Re: some changes for (slightly) faster boot

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 18:01 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> David Zeuthen (david fubar dk) said: 
> > It even looks like people are working on this
> > 
> >  http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/11/9/330
> 
> This is fundamentally uninteresting without userspace policy support.
> 

Which is planned to be added upstream in hal - in a nutshell, what is
needed for auto configuration of hardware is some mechanism to store 
configuration data about physical and logical devices in a persistent 
manner [1] accessible through a unified interface [2]. Once you have
that, it's not really hard to replace existing or write new policy
agents.

> Of course, foisting complication on userspace from the kernel seems
> to be the way to go these days, judging by udev. :)
> 

Heh, actually one thing I like about udev is the fact that it made
a lot of *existing* bugs and hacks like inserting "sleep 2" visible.
Oh wait, Greg KH already explained this here

 http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0409.2/0769.html

and in surrounding messages :-)

Cheers,
David

[1] : Including the ability to tie configuration to specific device
instances, e.g. if a physical devices lacks a serial number we need
to track the data by connection.

[2] : Meaning that we shouldn't have 1000 different configuration
files in various formats.  With a unified interface it becomes 
almost trivial to write a "real" device manager, e.g. hal-device-
manager just with real management, for example, "Select MAC 
Address", "Select Interface Name" or "Select Driver" buttons for 
configuring networking hardware. It's just a simple SetProperty()
method call over D-BUS.