Re: 2.6 debian-installer

[Bruce Perens]

Bruce: It sounds to me as if the path the kernel developers want us to take is to integrate most knowledge currently in discover and kudzu into hotplug. All devices present on the system should generate hotplug events, and the installer can capture those. Hotplug would use udev. Sven: This is sarge+1 d-i work though, is it not ? Since the installer isn't part of the installed system, I think it would be permissible to revise the installer before Sarge+1.  Perhaps that would help to keep the installer from being a critical-path item for Sarge+1. I don't know what all of the tasks are yet, but I have thought of a bunch that are connected with hotplug. Revise Hotplug pci.rc to use the sysfs mechanism to identify PCI devices and thus make it 2.6 compatible. Really trivial shell programming, and gets rid of the "can't synthesize PCI hotplug events" boot-time message. I don't understand why nobody has done it yet in making the rest of Debian 2.6 compatible. Perhaps nobody noticed? Is it in the hotplug CVS yet? Add these facilities to hotplug: Detect parallel ports. Load the drivers first, then probe them. Detect printers. Steal code from pconf_detect or detect. Detect serial ports. Again, load the drivers first, then iterate through the devices enumerated in /sys/class/tty, probing each in non-blocking mode. Detect serial modems using ATZ...OK handshake, then try ATIn to get more info. Is code for this in detect? Detect serial printers. Steal code from pconf_detect or detect. Can /sys/bus/input already detect serial mice? If not, steal code from mdetect or detect. Detect monitors on video cards. Add udev to the installer. Write scripts to marry hotplug into various configuration tasks. Not just in the installer, but on a running, installed system. Much of this can be stolen from what we are doing with detect presently.     Thanks     Bruce