On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 09:54:06AM -0500, jchacon@genuity.net wrote:
> There's 2 ways to really look at this:
> 
> 1. wssattach() looks at already assigned irq's and doesn't try to attach if
>    it's irq is taken. (Ok, yuck..violates some abstraction and gets very bad
>    very quick).
> 
> 2. Have isa_intr_establish return NULL on conflict cases and all drivers that
>    use it start checking return values. (Not horrible, but would require some
>    fairly wide code changes).

2) is the best way. I've always considered isa_intr_establish' behaviour
of "oh my god, I can't get an irq, let's panic" rather suboptimal.

I vaguely remember looking into this, and another problem is that
a driver's attach function returns void, and thus errors can not
be signaled. But I think it's ok for them to just return (some drivers
do this already) on some failure.

- Frank