LWN: Comments on "Dynamic USB device IDs"

Dynamic USB device IDs

jcm — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 14:09:35 +0000

I understand. My point is that there's nothing to stop DKMS or some other project from using this new API to facilitate getting devices to work either.

Sure, we all recompile our kernels every 10 minutes, but in the real world where there are a million people stuck on some $version of a distro, it'd be real nice if we could have it work with newer devices with such a simple hack rather than have them jump through too many hoops.

The average user isn't going to drop a new device id table entry to lkml :-)

Jon.

Dynamic USB device IDs

hadess — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:45:34 +0000

No. The point is to make the driver work "right now". It's something that you can already do with XFree96/X.org (using the DeviceID option IIRC), and with some kernel drivers (mainly storage ones).
Having the driver work straight away means that you can test it without recompiling a kernel. Then you should drop a mail for the ID to be added properly. It's just a work-around.

Dynamic USB device IDs

jcm — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 11:42:12 +0000

It'd be nice to see more of this kind of thing happening. Projects like DKMS already strive to make it easier to have devices detected and "just work" but this (semi obvious) patch helps more advanced users and admins to quickly get a device just installed. Perhaps this needs a userspace helper to allow a user to do this graphically.

Jon.