The patch below adds DMI/SMBIOS based module autoloading to the Linux
kernel. The idea is to load laptop drivers automatically (and other
drivers which cannot be autoloaded otherwise), based on the DMI system
identification information of the BIOS.
Right now most distros manually try to load all available laptop
drivers on bootup in the hope that at least one of them loads
successfully. This patch does away with all that, and uses udev to
automatically load matching drivers on the right machines.
Basically the patch just exports the DMI information that has been
parsed by the kernel anyway to userspace via a sysfs device
/sys/class/dmi/id and makes sure that proper modalias attributes are
available. Besides adding the "modalias" attribute it also adds
attributes for a few other DMI fields which might be useful for
writing udev rules.
This patch is not an attempt to export the entire DMI/SMBIOS data to
userspace. We already have "dmidecode" which parses the complete DMI
info from userspace. The purpose of this patch is machine model
identification and good udev integration.
To take advantage of DMI based module autoloading, a driver should
export one or more MODULE_ALIAS fields similar to these:
MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:svnMICRO-STARINT'LCO.,LTD:pnMS-1013:pvr0131*:cvnMICRO-STARINT'LCO.,LTD:ct10:*");
MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:svnMicro-StarInternational:pnMS-1058:pvr0581:rvnMSI:rnMS-1058:*:ct10:*");
MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:svnMicro-StarInternational:pnMS-1412:*:rvnMSI:rnMS-1412:*:cvnMICRO-STARINT'LCO.,LTD:ct10:*");
MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:svnNOTEBOOK:pnSAM2000:pvr0131*:cvnMICRO-STARINT'LCO.,LTD:ct10:*");
These lines are specific to my msi-laptop.c driver. They are basically
just a concatenation of a few carefully selected DMI fields with all
potentially bad characters stripped.
Besides laptop drivers, modules like "hdaps", the i2c modules
and the hwmon modules are good candidates for "dmi:" MODULE_ALIAS
lines.
Besides merely exporting the DMI data via sysfs the patch adds
support for a few more DMI fields. Especially the CHASSIS fields are
very useful to identify different laptop modules. The patch also adds
working MODULE_ALIAS lines to my msi-laptop.c driver.
I'd like to thank Kay Sievers for helping me to clean up this patch
for posting it on lkml.
Patch is against Linus' current GIT HEAD. Should probably apply to
older kernels as well without modification.
Signed-off-by: Lennart Poettering <mzxreary@0pointer.de>
Signed-off-by: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
This teaches dmi_decode() how to decode and save OEM Strings (type 11) DMI
information, which is currently discarded silently. Existing code using
DMI is not affected. Follows the "System Management BIOS (SMBIOS)
Specification" (http://www.dmtf.org/standards/smbios), and also the
userspace dmidecode.c code.
OEM Strings are the only safe way to identify some hardware, e.g., the
ThinkPad embedded controller used by the soon-to-be-submitted tp_smapi
driver. This will also let us eliminate the long whitelist in the mainline
hdaps driver (in a future patch).
Signed-off-by: Shem Multinymous <multinymous@gmail.com>
Cc: Bjorn Helgaas <bjorn.helgaas@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Add DMI interface functions to a new Firmware Interfaces chapter in the
kernel-api DocBook. Clean up kernel-doc in drivers/firmware/dmi_scan.c.
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
dmi_scan.c is arch-independent and is used by i386, x86_64, and ia64.
Currently all three arches compile it from arch/i386, which means that ia64
and x86_64 depend on things in arch/i386 that they wouldn't otherwise care
about.
This is simply "mv arch/i386/kernel/dmi_scan.c drivers/firmware/" (removing
trailing whitespace) and the associated Makefile changes. All three
architectures already set CONFIG_DMI in their top-level Kconfig files.
Signed-off-by: Bjorn Helgaas <bjorn.helgaas@hp.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de>
Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Andrey Panin <pazke@orbita1.ru>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Lennart Poettering