Re: [RFC PATCH] Multi-threaded device probing

[Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>]

Greg KH wrote:
> During the kernel summit, I was reminded by the wish by some people to
> do device probing in parallel, so I created the following patch.  It
> offers up the ability for the driver core to create a new thread for
> every driver<->device probe call.
...

Just FYI:

1.) SCSI:
There is a patch circulating at linux-scsi which adds parallelized bus 
scanning to the SCSI subsystem. I believe this cannot be built upon 
parallelization by driver core. But I am not too familiar with the 
subsystem facilities which this patch expands on. The patch is from 
Matthew Wilcox, titled "Asynchronous target discovery". 
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115349750400001

2.) IEEE 1394:
There was brief preliminary discussion of parallelized probing for the 
ieee1394 subsystem at linux1394-devel. Using driver core's 
parallelization would achieve about 1/3rd of what would be desirable. 
Background: After each bus reset, the 1394 core (nodemgr) has to 
download part or all of the configuration ROM of attached devices to 
determine their identity and capabilities. After that, either a protocol 
driver probe (generic device hook), a protocol driver remove or suspend 
routine (generic device hook), or a protocol driver update routine 
(extra 1394 subsystem hook) is executed; depending on whether nodes were 
added, removed, or in-use nodes were rediscovered. --- I.e. we better 
have these subthreads provided by ieee1394/nodemgr itself.
-- 
Stefan Richter
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