2007/477: Drivers registering devids

[James Carlson]

Garrett D'Amore writes:
> driver.conf seems like a hack to expose things to the framework, whereas
> normal driver.conf would be for non-global tunables for the driver (e.g.
> per instance configurables, etc.)

It does seem sort of backwards (driver giving values to the framework
rather than the other way around), but I think it makes some sense
here.

> I'm not sure that this is a stopper for this case, but I'd like the ARC
> to consider whether or not some more general registry (ala
> the /etc/driver_aliases, etc. registries) is perhaps better suited to
> this kind of purpose.

The problem with those registries is with upgrade.  You have to
support packaging scripts that may run on version N-2 (so, no new
management utilities will work) and way too many people seem to get
the update-central-file script wrong, breaking upgrade.  As long as
it's not too expensive in terms of performance to scan all those files
on a cache miss, I think this is simpler to manage.

Another way to do it would be in the ELF file itself (looking for a
reference to ddi_devid_register or for some new _depends_on or
-Nfoo/bar type thing), but that might be overkill.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive         71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677