OK, apparently some people are still confused about what I'm trying to do.
That's no surprise. It confuses *me* sometimes!
The issue is not ISA support, it is ISA *card* support. At the moment,
and for the foreseeable future, X86 implies ISA. Someday there may be
X86 motherboards without on-board ISA devices, but that's a few years off.
When that does happen, my logic will be something like this, where
PCI_BRIDGE is the test for whether PC reports an ISA bridge.
X86 and ((PCI and ISA_BRIDGE) or not PCI) => ISA
The "not PCI" case represents old ISA-only machines.
What I'm actually trying to do is determine whether the machine can
take ISA *cards*, and use that computation to suppress questions about
ISA cards (probed ones would still be found). For this, the logic
should look as follows, where:
* DMI means "reports DMI"
* DMI_ISA means "DMI reports ISA slots"
* BLACKLISTED means the motherboard is in an exception list of PCI-supporting,
DMI-supporting motherboards that falsely claim not to have ISA slots.
X86 and ((not PCI) or (not DMI) or DMI_ISA or BLACKLISTED => ISA_CARDS
This is one reason I want /sys/dmi -- because if I *don't* see it, that
means I should assume the machine is old enough to take ISA cards. This
filter should make the blacklist relatively small -- we wouldn't have to
track even PCI motherboards older than the DMI standard.
A key point is that as ISA phases out (near future now), the blacklist
will stop growing. Ballpark guess is it will top out below 150 entries.
-- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>If I were to select a jack-booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms]. -- U.S. Representative John Dingell, 1980 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/