Commit 4f5c791a authored by Lennart Poettering's avatar Lennart Poettering Committed by Greg Kroah-Hartman
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DMI-based module autoloading

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...
parent cfc94cdf
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