Re: PCMCIA product id strings -> hashes generation at compilation time? [Was: Re: [patch 14/38] pcmcia: id_table for wavelan_cs]

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Dominik Brodowski <linux@dominikbrodowski.net> wrote:
>
> Most pcmcia devices are matched to drivers using "product ID strings"
>  embedded in the devices' Card Information Structures, as "manufactor ID /
>  card ID" matches are much less reliable. Unfortunately, these strings cannot
>  be passed to userspace for easy userspace-based loading of appropriate
>  modules (MODNAME -- hotplug), so my suggestion is to also store crc32 hashes
>  of the strings in the MODULE_DEVICE_TABLEs, e.g.:
> 
>  PCMCIA_DEVICE_PROD_ID12("LINKSYS", "E-CARD", 0xf7cb0b07, 0x6701da11),

What is the difficulty in passing these strings via /sbin/hotplug arguments?

> ...
>  To make the life easier for device driver authors,
>  	- a big warning is put into dmesg if a pcmcia driver is inserted
>  	  into the kernel and the hash mentioned in PCMCIA_DEVICE_PROD_ID()
>  	  is incorrect,

As long as the kernel shouts loudly at the driver developer at
development-time, and that shouting mentions a bit of documentation in
Documentation/somewhere, I expect we'll be OK.