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

[Mark Brown]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 01:40:24PM -0500, Timur Tabi wrote:
> 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.

My suggestion is that you change this for the root node.  It's already
got the information required in there, it's just there's no way to use
it to load modules at the minute.  You could presumably read the
information out of the device tree using existing APIs to check you're
running on the right board once code is loaded?