Re: [alsa-devel] [PATCH v2 1/3] ALSA SoC: Add OpenFirmware helper for matching bus and codec drivers

Mark Brown wrote:

Desktop Management Interface, a standard BIOS interface for getting system data on x86 class hardware. Of particular interest here is the fact that it contains various ID strings for things like motherboard and chassis - on Linux drivers can be automatically loaded based on these strings. See drivers/misc/thinkpad_acpi.c for an example of a driver that does this.

The only problem with this is that the OF probing code in the kernel binds drivers to device tree nodes. So when a driver claims a node, no other driver will be probed with it.

So we can't have generic nodes that classify the motherboard and just let everyone get probed on it.