Kudzu API Documentation

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 18:57 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 06:32:51PM -0400, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> > I would think just read the code.  I am not sure if there are any formal
> > docs.  BTW Kudzu is most likely going away as soon as HAL can take over
> > all the tasks Kudzu handles.
> 
> Including "locking up my system at boot"?
> 
> Just wonderin'. :)
> 

You're most probably referring to broken kernel drivers caused by hal
poking the devices.  The problem here is that in order to do automatic
hardware configuration the right way, one actually needs to interact
with the hardware and since it's done from a program rather than some
user doing it interactively from a terminal, it sometimes confuses poor
drivers that, as a side effect, lock up your system.

The drivers just needs to get fixed and from what I can see this is
getting better, not worse. Of course, out-of-tree drivers are slower to
catch up but such is life. For example, at http://at76c503a.berlios.de/
there is an out-of-tree driver that I use for a USB 802.11b wireless
device on my Powerbook 12". It works nice when configuring it
interactively from the terminal (doing the ifconfig, iwconfig, dhclient
styff) but it doesn't work that nice with hal/NetworkManager. Ditto for
some USB storage devices but this has improved a lot since 2.6.10 or so.

In a way, I'd argue that having hal and NetworkManager doing all this
device probing actually helps out getting the drivers in better shape
because users report bugs and bugs get fixed.

    David