Your meaning isn't entirely clear. Presumably HAL will contain such a
whitelist. But there's nothing to stop you from setting up your own
whitelist via udev scripts, or even turning autosuspend on or off by
hand.
It's not clear that this sort of approach will turn out to be workable.
Whitelists/blacklists do okay in the kernel when they refer to a
relatively small subset of devices. However in this case I have the
impression that we're talking about roughly a 50/50 split. Keeping an
in-kernel list with even 10% of all existing USB devices simply isn't
feasible.
Besides, is it really that much harder for userspace to modify device
settings as the devices are detected than for it to modify an in-kernel
whitelist just once? Don't forget about possible races: Devices may
already have been detected and configured before userspace was able to
modify the whitelist.
Alan Stern
-
