LINUX的热插拔机制（经典文章）

 linux的热插拔是Greg Kroah-Hartman维护，所以这是篇经典文章。如果你有USB或者PCI设备驱动开发基础，一读就可以理解。
Hot-pluggable devices have been created to solve a number of user needs. On laptop computers, PCMCIA devices were designed to allow the user to swap cards while the computer was still running. This allowed people to change network adaptors, memory cards and even disk drives without shutting down the machine.
The success of this led to the creation of the USB and IEEE1394 (FireWire) buses. These designs allow for peripherals to be attached and removed at any point. They also were created to try to move systems away from the ISA bus to a full Plug-and-Play-type system.
from the operating system's point of view, there are many problems with hot plugging devices. In the past, the operating system only had to search for the various devices connected to it on power-up, and once seen, the device would never go away. from the view of the device driver, it never expects to have the hardware that it is trying to control disappear. But with hot-pluggable devices, all of this changes.
Now the operating system has to have a mechanism that constantly detects if a new device appears. This usually is done by a bus-specific manager. This manager handles the scanning for new devices and recognizes this disappearance. It must be able to create system resources for the new device and pass control off to a specific driver. The device driver for a hot-pluggable device has to be able to recover gracefully when the hardware is removed and be able to bind itself to new hardware at any moment. Not only does the kernel need to know when devices are removed or added, but the user also should be notified when this happens. Other kinds of kernel events, such as the creation of network devices or the insertion of a laptop into a docking station, also would be useful for the user to know about.
This article describes the new framework in the Linux kernel for supporting USB and