Driver core: udev triggered device-<>driver binding

We get two per-bus sysfs files:
  ls-l /sys/subsystem/usb
  drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    0 2007-02-16 16:42 devices
  drwxr-xr-x 7 root root    0 2007-02-16 14:55 drivers
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 2007-02-16 16:42 drivers_autoprobe
  --w------- 1 root root 4096 2007-02-16 16:42 drivers_probe

The flag "drivers_autoprobe" controls the behavior of the bus to bind
devices by default, or just initialize the device and leave it alone.

The command "drivers_probe" accepts a bus_id and the bus tries to bind a
driver to this device.

Systems who want to control the driver binding with udev, switch off the
bus initiated probing:
  echo 0 > /sys/subsystem/usb/drivers_autoprobe
  echo 0 > /sys/subsystem/pcmcia/drivers_autoprobe
  ...

and initiate the probing with udev rules like:
  ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{subsystem/drivers_probe}="$kernel"
  ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pcmcia", ATTR{subsystem/drivers_probe}="$kernel"
  ...

Custom driver binding can happen in earlier rules by something like:
  ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", \
  ATTRS{idVendor}=="1234", ATTRS{idProduct}=="5678" \
  ATTR{subsystem/drivers/<custom-driver>/bind}="$kernel"

This is intended to solve the modprobe.conf mess with "install-rules", custom
bind/unbind-scripts and all the weird things people invented over the years.
It should also provide the functionality "libusual" was supposed to do.

With udev, one can just write a udev rule to drive all USB-disks at the
third port of USB-hub by the "ub" driver, and everything else by
usb-storage. One can also instruct udev to bind different wireless
drivers to identical cards - just selected by the pcmcia slot-number, and
whatever ...

To use the mentioned rules, it needs udev version 106, to be able to
write ATTR{}="$kernel" to sysfs files.

Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
2 files changed