[snip]
> She's just heard about a PCMCIA card that has a MEMS array of chemical
> sensors on it. The thing could replace the bulky, balky
> gel-chromatography setup she's using now, and make it unnecessary for
> her to fight other students for bench time. There's even a Linux
> driver for the card (and user-space utilities to talk to it) on one of
> the bio sites she uses -- way too specialized an item for her distro
> to carry, and anyway she doesn't want to wait for the next release.
>
> Penelope needs to build a kernel to support her exotic driver, but she
> hasn't got more than the vaguest idea how to go about it. The
[snip]
Wrong. She needs to compile a new module for her kernel. What might be
useful is some automagic tool that will find the vendor-provided kernel
source tree and config (which is usually /boot/config-`uname -r`, but
still findable anyhow) and then compile said module for her, toss it
into the modules dir and maybe even add it to the always-loaded module
list (just incase hotplug doesn't grok it).
With some support from people writing external drivers, you could even
have a file that lists things like which files are needed, a URL and
version info, and store it someplace too.
-- Tom Rini (TR1265) http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/