On PCI ids being embedded in drivers...

[Philip Prindeville]

I've been a bit frustrated by the time it takes a PCI ID to get
reported back to the source maintainers, eventually committed into
source, picked up by the various Linux packagers, and pushed out
via distribution (yum or whatever).

Does it even make sense to (1) fragment this information which
is pretty much common amongst various drivers (except maybe
some driver-specific flags such as LVDS support, etc. which
could be defined in a driver-defined field), (2) compile this
information into the drivers?

Why not have a "PCI" module that handles scanning for ID's
and picking up the associated information from the tabular file?

Since it only needs to be done at startup, parsing overhead isn't
a very convincing argument...  worst case, we could do it as a
data-only .so that gets linked in, but that users could update and
rebuild themselves (of course, that means that the compiler/linker
would have to be present to do so).  Only possible hitch I can
think of is that a voluminous table of data is extra space and
start-up overhead for embedded systems...  But for most, having
plug-n-play is a good thing.

What do you all think?  Could this make it onto the 7.1 roadmap?

-Philip