Re: Need break driver<-->pci-device automatic association

[Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk>]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 10:57:21PM +0200, Jacques Goldberg wrote:
> 
>    Great, Russell. Now we understand each other.
>    Actually some chip manufacturers are responsible for this mess. Some do
> NOT burn a modem class flag in the hardware, others do.
>    Is it nonsense to imagine that the part of 8250_pci which handles modem
> class become a loadable module?
>    We could then load the "linmodem" driver first, which would not disturb
> use of true modems.

No, that's not a reliable solution.

What it comes back to is that we _need_ driver match priorities, so we
can detect when a more specific driver for the device is loaded (iow
one which matches by vendor+device rather than just class), unbind the
existing driver, and bind the more specific one.

I've been mentioning this need for over a year now (for a different
scenario) and it hasn't particularly been going anywhere.  However,
your case boosts the reason why we need this functionality.

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:  2.6 Serial core