best way to determine devices with drivers

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 11:00, andrew luecke wrote:
> Hey all. 

Heya,

sorry for the delay,

> currently I'm working on a driver install system for linux, which 
> I'm hoping may one day help complement other linux usability projects, that 
> automatically finds drivers on the internet for devices that dont already 
> have them installed.
> 

Interesting.

> My problem is that to use HAL, I need a way of determining if a device 
> already has a driver installed and is active (so I can tell if I need to 
> install one). I have noticed under 0.2.92 that  there is a namespace I can 
> use called "linux.driver".. However, I noticed when I ran lshal on my 
> devices that not even one of them had linux.driver listed.. So, does anyone 
> know if this is the best way, or is there a better way (I noticed that HAL 
> device manager listed my USB camera with no driver as an unknown device).
> 

Just to clarify, the meaning of linux.driver would be to indicate what
kernel space driver is attached to the device; if your USB camera is
handled by libgphoto probably no driver would be attached and
linux.driver would not exist or be empty. HAL on FreeBSD, would probably
expose freebsd.driver with the same semantics :-)

> Any idea if its just because nothing is using the linux.driver flag yet, 
> lshal isn't listing it, or/and any better methods of determining if the 
> driver is working (info.not_available maybe??)
> 

The linux.driver property used to be there before I rewrote some of the
code, but I removed it for some reason, IIRC it's because HAL uses an
old local copy of libsysfs that doesn't expose this for some reason. It
makes sense to put it back in, but it will probably require an upgrade
of the libsysfs sources in the HAL tree; shouldn't be too much work
though.

Cheers,
David


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