Re: RFC: nuke pcidevs and usbdevs

[Sascha Wildner <saw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thomas E. Spanjaard wrote:
> Hasso Tepper wrote:
> >  - Remove the usbdevs and pcidevs files. If the code wants to use defines
> >    for vendor and/or device id's, it has to define them itself.
>
> Con. Imho, it's better to keep things like these in one place, for 
> easier maintenance and collision-spotting. The problem is we didn't 
> really inherit pcidevs from FreeBSD, but added it later on, making lots 
> of drivers ill-adjusted, or not adjusted at all, to pcidevs.

pcidevs sounds like a good idea, The Right Thing etc. when one first 
looks at it, but...

* Companies like to change names, assign the same product name to 
different product IDs, etc.

* Even the BSDs using pcidevs.h (Open, Net) can't agree on using the 
same names for the same IDs as I've seen when I was converting some 
network drivers to use pcidevs.h.

* To properly identify many devices you have to look at chip revision 
info and several other things anyway, some of which seem hard to 
formalize in pcidevs.h.

So pcidevs.h just adds ambiguity but gains little actual value, if you 
don't count "having all in one central place" as a value in itself which 
it is not if that is all you get.

So personally, I'm for hardcoding the IDs in the drivers. Since the 
descriptions are also hardcoded, it shouldn't really confuse someone 
reading the code to find out what ID is which device.

I'm also against printing info about unattached devices in dmesg. Why 
would we want it? There's pciconf(8). Of course the info is from 
upstream. But I'm actually quite happy with not having to maintain a 
"complete" PCI ID list ourselves.

Sascha

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