From: Petr V. <VAN...@vc...> - 2002-06-08 01:05:28
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On 8 Jun 02 at 2:57, Dave Jones wrote: > On Sat, Jun 08, 2002 at 02:45:39AM +0200, Petr Vandrovec wrote: > > (4) You can read PINS through /proc. > > (H) Change /proc code to use driverfs instead. Linus refused > > /proc based code already. > > One of the first things I ever wrote for Linux was a PINS decoder. > It read from /dev/mem to get the PINS structure. Any reason > why this isn't good enough, and we need the kernel exporting PINS ? It does not print decoded structure, it shows it in raw format, 64-128 bytes, just to avoid userspace parsing /dev/mem because of matroxfb did it already (and matroxfb needs PINS to properly initialize Gx50 cards in non-PC hardware). And it may be non-trivial to get PINS from userspace at all because of BIOSes may be disabled by firmware (and f.e. on my PC they are disabled for secondary adapters, so simple parsing /dev/mem leads to nowhere because of BIOS is hidden). Besides that, it lives in complete separate file, so it is easy to add/remove it. Best regards, Petr Vandrovec van...@vc... |