Re: getting configuration info into a driver at load-time

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

> I thought about exposing this config structure in /sys or /proc (in a 
> per-board directory), and let the user poke in the config values after 
> the driver has loaded, but I'd really prefer to make the information 
> available at load-time.

Various drivers do load it after load time (and for one that allows you
to change the configuration without a restart which is usually a good
thing). In some cases driver that need a configuration to do sane things
fails other I/O with an error like EIO until a configuration is
established via ioctl or sysfs or similar.
 
> Currently the driver has a module param array of char*, with each 
> board's configuration encoded into an ascii string which gets decoded 
> "by hand" in the driver.  Pretty grotty.
> 
> Is there some easier/cleaner way to do this?

You can always request_firmware() the tables... bit hackish but works

Alan