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+ACPI Scan Handlers
+
+Copyright (C) 2012, Intel Corporation
+Author: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
+
+During system initialization and ACPI-based device hot-add, the ACPI namespace
+is scanned in search of device objects that generally represent various pieces
+of hardware.  This causes a struct acpi_device object to be created and
+registered with the driver core for every device object in the ACPI namespace
+and the hierarchy of those struct acpi_device objects reflects the namespace
+layout (i.e. parent device objects in the namespace are represented by parent
+struct acpi_device objects and analogously for their children).  Those struct
+acpi_device objects are referred to as "device nodes" in what follows, but they
+should not be confused with struct device_node objects used by the Device Trees
+parsing code (although their role is analogous to the role of those objects).
+
+During ACPI-based device hot-remove device nodes representing pieces of hardware
+being removed are unregistered and deleted.
+
+The core ACPI namespace scanning code in drivers/acpi/scan.c carries out basic
+initialization of device nodes, such as retrieving common configuration
+information from the device objects represented by them and populating them with
+appropriate data, but some of them require additional handling after they have
+been registered.  For example, if the given device node represents a PCI host
+bridge, its registration should cause the PCI bus under that bridge to be
+enumerated and PCI devices on that bus to be registered with the driver core.
+Similarly, if the device node represents a PCI interrupt link, it is necessary
+to configure that link so that the kernel can use it.
+
+Those additional configuration tasks usually depend on the type of the hardware
+component represented by the given device node which can be determined on the
+basis of the device node's hardware ID (HID).  They are performed by objects
+called ACPI scan handlers represented by the following structure:
+
+struct acpi_scan_handler {
+	const struct acpi_device_id *ids;
+	struct list_head list_node;
+	int (*attach)(struct acpi_device *dev, const struct acpi_device_id *id);
+	void (*detach)(struct acpi_device *dev);
+};
+
+where ids is the list of IDs of device nodes the given handler is supposed to
+take care of, list_node is the hook to the global list of ACPI scan handlers
+maintained by the ACPI core and the .attach() and .detach() callbacks are
+executed, respectively, after registration of new device nodes and before
+unregistration of device nodes the handler attached to previously.
+
+The namespace scanning function, acpi_bus_scan(), first registers all of the
+device nodes in the given namespace scope with the driver core.  Then, it tries
+to match a scan handler against each of them using the ids arrays of the
+available scan handlers.  If a matching scan handler is found, its .attach()
+callback is executed for the given device node.  If that callback returns 1,
+that means that the handler has claimed the device node and is now responsible
+for carrying out any additional configuration tasks related to it.  It also will
+be responsible for preparing the device node for unregistration in that case.
+The device node's handler field is then populated with the address of the scan
+handler that has claimed it.
+
+If the .attach() callback returns 0, it means that the device node is not
+interesting to the given scan handler and may be matched against the next scan
+handler in the list.  If it returns a (negative) error code, that means that
+the namespace scan should be terminated due to a serious error.  The error code
+returned should then reflect the type of the error.
+
+The namespace trimming function, acpi_bus_trim(), first executes .detach()
+callbacks from the scan handlers of all device nodes in the given namespace
+scope (if they have scan handlers).  Next, it unregisters all of the device
+nodes in that scope.
+
+ACPI scan handlers can be added to the list maintained by the ACPI core with the
+help of the acpi_scan_add_handler() function taking a pointer to the new scan
+handler as an argument.  The order in which scan handlers are added to the list
+is the order in which they are matched against device nodes during namespace
+scans.
+
+All scan handles must be added to the list before acpi_bus_scan() is run for the
+first time and they cannot be removed from it.