Re: Device information for PDAs

[Andrei Yurkevich <urruru ru ru>]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 21:49 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 03:36 +0400, Andrei Yurkevich wrote:
> >  1) serial ports are marked as PDA devices. A 'pda' capability is set
> > and a 'pda.platform' property, the latter is figured out depending on
> > what driver runs the parent USB interface.
> >  2) all other information is stored as "pda.palm.*", "pda.pocketpc.*"
> > and "pda.whateverelse.*".
> 
> OK, that sounds good. I wonder how all this is going to work with the
> userspace visor driver on mentioned here on gnome-pilot-list
> 
>  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-pilot-list/2005-March/msg00042.html
> 
> I mean, if HAL is going to be useful in that scenario, it doesn't really
> helps to match on the visor driver if the user space driver is going to
> unload it (since hal will remove that device object) - in that case we
> rather should match for USB vid and pid and put the 'pda' capability and
> properties on the USB interface. 

Unfortunately, I'm not an expert in PalmOS devices, but from what I have
figured out so far, the driver will be detached or even not have been
loaded at all, so HAL can only be useful if it works with the USB
interface. If the interface has a visor driver bound to we can hint
about which of the serial devices to use as hotsync while if there is no
driver for the interface we can still tag it as a PalmOS pda if it
matches vid/pid. Anyway, to be useful with libusb scenario we need to
work the with usb interface, not serial devices. But both ways will
suffice the Pocket PC devices and we can still match the 'ipaq' driver
there.

> Do you know whether if gnome-pilot is going to drop support for the
> visor kernel driver entirely or if it's a build-time option? My initial
> thoughts is that it's a pretty bad idea to move this to user space, but
> I could be wrong.

I have no idea, but if there is really a huge performance boost with
userland driver then it is really a good idea. We definitely need some
comments from the pilot-link/gnome-pilot guys (crossposting to their
lists).

cheers,
Andrei