[Lcd4linux-devel] Dynamic loading of drivers / plugins ?

[Xavier V. <xav...@fr...>]

Hello Michael and all the fantastics lcd4linux contributors ;) !

I checked out the CVS from another machine with decent adsl internet
acces, cfg_get() seems to work now. plugin_i2c_sensors will be soon
finished ;)

I saw you're beginning a rewrite of LCDs drivers at the same time of
plugins. One suggestion : shouldn't we think about so-ing all these
plugins and drivers (and place them in /usr/lib/lcd4linux) so that
lcd4linux can load only the driver(s) and plugins that are used, so it
can consume a lot less memory ! Furthermore, with the debian packages,
we shouldn't rely on compile-time options (dvb, X11, ...).

Automatic loading of LCDs driver will be somewhat easy to do as it's
specified in the config file. I would be fast to implement.

The case of plugins can be more problematic : how can the evaluator
guess which .so it has to load, maybe an internal tree of functions
provided by plugins asociated with a scan of functions evaluated. If the
evaluator doesn't know a function it scans in the tree for the plugin
providing this function. It won't produce a speed-down as the necessary
plugins are loaded at the first loop (in the case of the config file,
not interactive mode) and will permit IMHO more flexibility and consume
less memory.

In think you know a little about external libraries as the binary uses a
liblcd4linux library, about me, I don't think I'll be able to help much
as I'm very lame at C coding ;)


What about it ? Please consider it, talk about it, enjoy ;)

Bye !
-- 
Xavier VELLO <xav...@fr...>