Re: Hardware Inventory [was: Re: ISA slot detection on PCI systems?]

[Richard Gooch <rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca>]

Patrick Mochel writes:
> 
> On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, Paul Jakma wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Dave Jones wrote:
> >
> > >  When devicefs is ready (or more to the point, the drivers become
> > >  devicefs aware), something to the effect of ls -R /devices
> > >  should be possible.
> >
> > how does devicefs differ from devfs? eg, on some of my systems i mount
> > devfs on /devfs and an ls -l of it shows all the devices that
> > currently have drivers that registered them.
> 
> It's actually driverfs ;). (I know it's confusing, I wanted devfs, but it
> was already taken.)
> 
> It exports devices based on their locality. On my test box, I have this
> output:
> 
> sh-2.05# find pci0/ -type d
> pci0/
> pci0/00:1f.4
> pci0/00:1f.3
> pci0/00:1f.2
> pci0/00:1f.1
> pci0/00:1f.0
> pci0/00:02.0
> pci0/00:00.0
> 
> Nodes are added by the bus driver as it enumerates the bus, before
> device-specific drivers are loaded.

This is in fact something that I've had planned for devfs as well: a
/dev/bus hierarchy.

> devfs groups devices based on device class (video, net, disk,
> etc). Adding primitive support for this should be pretty easy to
> driverfs, though there are many nasty details to work out.

Well, devfs itself doesn't lay things out, it's the drivers that do
this. My plan is to have /dev/scsi/host# become a symlink to something
like /dev/bus/pci0/slot1/function1 (a directory).

It still eludes me why a new device FS was developed when devfs
already has the mechanisms that are needed.

				Regards,

					Richard....
Permanent: rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
Current:   rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca