Re: Split AGP GART device lists.

Dave Jones (davej@codemonkey.org.uk)
Mon, 2 Dec 2002 17:23:31 +0000


[taking this to the lists, to keep anyone who cares about this in the loop]

This conversation evolved out of my split-agpgart-device-list patch.
Linus' proposal is to take this a step further and split each of
the chipsets into a seperate module. I'm about to tackle this,
but in case there's some hidden gotchas that myself and Linus have
overlooked, I figured I'd give a 'heads up'.

Any comments?

Dave.

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 08:55:24AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> > I'm worrying about breaking existing behaviour.
> > X loads /dev/agpgart, which pulls in agpgart.o, but what pulls
> > in via.o, amd.o etc.. ?
>
> Done right, the regular PCI driver detection should load the thing
> automatically without X needing to do anything at all. With the AGP
> drivers showing up with the PCI entries they can drive, all the normal
> auto-loading should just work _without_ having any special cases.
>
> I really think this is worth doing _right_, without stupid (and incorrect)
> module dependencies. Even if it breaks something, it's worth doing:
> people who compile their own kernels can just compile the AGP driver
> statically, the way all sane people - me - do, and people who don't
> compile their own kernels obviously get them from distributions that can
> trivially make modprobe do the right thing.
>
> We get "eth0" behaviour right without having to have some "eth0" driver
> that knows about all the devices that might be networking devices.
> Similarly, we should get agp behaviour right without having to have some
> silly central thing.

-- 
| Dave Jones.        http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs
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