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+LINUX HOTPLUGGING
+
+In hotpluggable busses like USB (and Cardbus PCI), end-users plug devices
+into the bus with power on.  In most cases, users expect the devices to become
+immediately usable.  That means the system must do many things, including:
+
+    - Find a driver that can handle the device.  That may involve
+      loading a kernel module; newer drivers can use module-init-tools
+      to publish their device (and class) support to user utilities.
+
+    - Bind a driver to that device.  Bus frameworks do that using a
+      device driver's probe() routine.
+
+    - Tell other subsystems to configure the new device.  Print
+      queues may need to be enabled, networks brought up, disk
+      partitions mounted, and so on.  In some cases these will
+      be driver-specific actions.
+
+This involves a mix of kernel mode and user mode actions.  Making devices
+be immediately usable means that any user mode actions can't wait for an
+administrator to do them:  the kernel must trigger them, either passively
+(triggering some monitoring daemon to invoke a helper program) or
+actively (calling such a user mode helper program directly).
+
+Those triggered actions must support a system's administrative policies;
+such programs are called "policy agents" here.  Typically they involve
+shell scripts that dispatch to more familiar administration tools.
+
+Because some of those actions rely on information about drivers (metadata)
+that is currently available only when the drivers are dynamically linked,
+you get the best hotplugging when you configure a highly modular system.
+
+
+KERNEL HOTPLUG HELPER (/sbin/hotplug)
+
+There is a kernel parameter: /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug, which normally
+holds the pathname "/sbin/hotplug".  That parameter names a program
+which the kernel may invoke at various times.
+
+The /sbin/hotplug program can be invoked by any subsystem as part of its
+reaction to a configuration change, from a thread in that subsystem.
+Only one parameter is required: the name of a subsystem being notified of
+some kernel event.  That name is used as the first key for further event
+dispatch; any other argument and environment parameters are specified by
+the subsystem making that invocation.
+
+Hotplug software and other resources is available at:
+
+	http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net
+
+Mailing list information is also available at that site.
+
+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+USB POLICY AGENT
+
+The USB subsystem currently invokes /sbin/hotplug when USB devices
+are added or removed from system.  The invocation is done by the kernel
+hub workqueue [hub_wq], or else as part of root hub initialization
+(done by init, modprobe, kapmd, etc).  Its single command line parameter
+is the string "usb", and it passes these environment variables:
+
+    ACTION ... "add", "remove"
+    PRODUCT ... USB vendor, product, and version codes (hex)
+    TYPE ... device class codes (decimal)
+    INTERFACE ... interface 0 class codes (decimal)
+
+If "usbdevfs" is configured, DEVICE and DEVFS are also passed.  DEVICE is
+the pathname of the device, and is useful for devices with multiple and/or
+alternate interfaces that complicate driver selection.  By design, USB
+hotplugging is independent of "usbdevfs":  you can do most essential parts
+of USB device setup without using that filesystem, and without running a
+user mode daemon to detect changes in system configuration.
+
+Currently available policy agent implementations can load drivers for
+modules, and can invoke driver-specific setup scripts.  The newest ones
+leverage USB module-init-tools support.  Later agents might unload drivers.
+
+
+USB MODUTILS SUPPORT
+
+Current versions of module-init-tools will create a "modules.usbmap" file
+which contains the entries from each driver's MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE.  Such
+files can be used by various user mode policy agents to make sure all the
+right driver modules get loaded, either at boot time or later.
+
+See <linux/usb.h> for full information about such table entries; or look
+at existing drivers.  Each table entry describes one or more criteria to
+be used when matching a driver to a device or class of devices.  The
+specific criteria are identified by bits set in "match_flags", paired
+with field values.  You can construct the criteria directly, or with
+macros such as these, and use driver_info to store more information.
+
+    USB_DEVICE (vendorId, productId)
+	... matching devices with specified vendor and product ids
+    USB_DEVICE_VER (vendorId, productId, lo, hi)
+	... like USB_DEVICE with lo <= productversion <= hi
+    USB_INTERFACE_INFO (class, subclass, protocol)
+	... matching specified interface class info
+    USB_DEVICE_INFO (class, subclass, protocol)
+	... matching specified device class info
+
+A short example, for a driver that supports several specific USB devices
+and their quirks, might have a MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE like this:
+
+    static const struct usb_device_id mydriver_id_table[] = {
+	{ USB_DEVICE (0x9999, 0xaaaa), driver_info: QUIRK_X },
+	{ USB_DEVICE (0xbbbb, 0x8888), driver_info: QUIRK_Y|QUIRK_Z },
+	...
+	{ } /* end with an all-zeroes entry */
+    };
+    MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE(usb, mydriver_id_table);
+
+Most USB device drivers should pass these tables to the USB subsystem as
+well as to the module management subsystem.  Not all, though: some driver
+frameworks connect using interfaces layered over USB, and so they won't
+need such a "struct usb_driver".
+
+Drivers that connect directly to the USB subsystem should be declared
+something like this:
+
+    static struct usb_driver mydriver = {
+	.name		= "mydriver",
+	.id_table	= mydriver_id_table,
+	.probe		= my_probe,
+	.disconnect	= my_disconnect,
+
+	/*
+	if using the usb chardev framework:
+	    .minor		= MY_USB_MINOR_START,
+	    .fops		= my_file_ops,
+	if exposing any operations through usbdevfs:
+	    .ioctl		= my_ioctl,
+	*/
+    };
+
+When the USB subsystem knows about a driver's device ID table, it's used when
+choosing drivers to probe().  The thread doing new device processing checks
+drivers' device ID entries from the MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE against interface and
+device descriptors for the device.  It will only call probe() if there is a
+match, and the third argument to probe() will be the entry that matched.
+
+If you don't provide an id_table for your driver, then your driver may get
+probed for each new device; the third parameter to probe() will be null.
+
+