Minor PC Card work

I have a large collection of PC Cards. Well over 100, maybe over 200 cards. These cards are my test bed for the FreeBSD PC Card (both 16-bit and 32-bit) software that I maintain. Sometimes, I take cards out of the boxes at random at times and try them. Other times, I'll take all the cards that are affected by a certain driver change and test them. When I did that recently, I found a hole in the PC Card system.

This hole is very minor. There's no way for a driver to select the configuration entry that is used for the card. Usually, this doesn't matter one bit at all. Drivers work perfectly fine with the configuration that's automatically selected for cards. The PC Card spec has evolved over the years to the point where it is all automated. Certainly for 32-bit cards, but also for most 16-bit cards, even multifunction ones.

However, there's some older cards, some of them interesting to me, that need some special hand holding. These cards perform better with different entries, or activate both the ethernet and the modem on the card, instead of just the modem, when a different entry is selected. Trouble was, there was no way to do this in FreeBSD easily.

I just committed some changes to the PC Card system that will allow 16-bit PC Cards to select the configuration entry entry they will use. There are some restrictions. First, it can only be done in the probe routine for the driver. Second, the driver's probe routine must return 0. Big problems happen if the card is merely 'bidding' on a device and tries to set the right configuration. This may seem harsh, until you realize that if a probe routine knows enough about the card to try to set a configuration entry, then it isn't a generic driver anymore.

Also, as a nice side effect of this work, I've made things more robust for people that insert a card, only to discover that they didn't have the driver for it loaded. There used to be many sharp edges in this code that could cause resource leaks when just the right sequences of load/unload of drivers and removal and insertion of the cards happened. Now, it is all done in one routine, so things should be more robust. Please contact me if I somehow messed that up.

So this is one more ripple effect of the IF_NEEDSGIANT removal patches. I never would have looked at this stuff had I not been testing patches for John Baldwin. It is interesting the sorts of trails one finds oneself down when trying to help others out, as well as test some hardware that would otherwise be laying around.