• Andi Kleen's avatar
    Add driver auto probing for x86 features v4 · 644e9cbb
    Andi Kleen authored
    There's a growing number of drivers that support a specific x86 feature
    or CPU.  Currently loading these drivers currently on a generic
    distribution requires various driver specific hacks and it often
    doesn't work.
    
    This patch adds auto probing for drivers based on the x86 cpuid
    information, in particular based on vendor/family/model number
    and also based on CPUID feature bits.
    
    For example a common issue is not loading the SSE 4.2 accelerated
    CRC module: this can significantly lower the performance of BTRFS
    which relies on fast CRC.
    
    Another issue is loading the right CPUFREQ driver for the current CPU.
    Currently distributions often try all all possible driver until
    one sticks, which is not really a good way to do this.
    
    It works with existing udev without any changes. The code
    exports the x86 information as a generic string in sysfs
    that can be matched by udev's pattern matching.
    
    This scheme does not support numeric ranges, so if you want to
    handle e.g. range...
    644e9cbb
cpu_device_id.h 294 Bytes