* Ronald G Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov [060915 18:55]:
The tricky part for me is still this. If I have four instances of X driver, there's no way I know of in kconfig to set different params for each instance. In kconfig, you say "I have an X", but you can't say, "this is another instance of X, but this time, turn OFF this feature". For example, take this: config 8139TOO_PIO bool "Use PIO instead of MMIO" default y depends on 8139TOO
You can't say "use PIO for instance 1 and don't use it for instance 2". That's not doable in Konfig.
And not in our current tool either. I believe we should go one step at a time.
We would now do 4 options if we want 4 instances. Similar as you did with the compression algorithm
chip northbridge/amd/amdk8 with totally different settings for each one.
This is a completely different quality of tuning than "set baud rate to 19200" imho.
Any mod to the config system -- or new config system -- needs to take this into account. Settings for instances of a given part are not the same for all instances of that part -- they can't be, at the bios level.
We want
a) Kconfig for configuration issues b) a tree parser for the rest.
Remember: the tree parser does not set config options as -DCONFIG_BAUD_RATE=19200 but it creates the static device tree: a couple of C files.
We mixed these two things in v2 and taring it apart is giving us a hard time now. But we should.
I don't think Linux Kconfig can accomodate that, but maybe it can. The Kconfig 'all variables global' rule seems to indicate it can't.
It can't. And it shouldnt.
It's funny to hear us arguing *for* global variables :-),but we are :-)
Because we have an incomplete picture of the tree.
Otherwise the Cache-As-Ram enable switch would be a property of the K8 nodes in the tree. the baud rate would be a property of the serial node which hangs off the superio which hangs off the south bridge.
More logical? Yes. Easier? Dunno.