Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution

[Eric S. Raymond]

Eric W. Biederman <[e-mail]>:
> ISA is not a software enumerable bus especially not for unprivledged
> users.  And no amount of complaining will change that.  That is why we
> have PNP ISA and PCI.

But the kernel itself has to know how to probe and initialize these devices
at boot time, correct?  That information is implicitly exported via
/var/log/dmesg -- I'm simply suggesting that it be a little more explicit.

> > But suppose the format of boot-time driver messages were standardized in a
> > format that included their config symbol in a discoverable form?
> 
> If there was an ISA device in your example it might be interesting.

Some of the on-board devices on my Tyan Thunder are ISA.

> > With this change, generating a report on ISA hardware and other
> > facilities configured in at boot time would be trivial.  This would
> > make the autoconfigurator much more capable.  Best of all, the only
> > change required to accomplish this would be safe edits of print format
> > strings.
> 
> It sounds like what you want is an lsmod that lists compiled in
> modules.

Would that be feasible without root privileges in order to read kmem?
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

[The disarming of citizens] has a double effect, it palsies the hand
and brutalizes the mind: a habitual disuse of physical forces totally
destroys the moral [force]; and men lose at once the power of
protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their
oppression.
        -- Joel Barlow, "Advice to the Privileged Orders", 1792-93