The old PCMCIA cardmgr daemon has been obsoleted by the new sysfs and hotplug system in latest kernels (>= 2.6.13). The installer stage1 used to embed its own simplified copy of the cardmgr damemon.

My plan is to use sysfs to detect PCMCIA devices in stage1 now (that will be the first probing code to use sysfs in stage1!). The device description will be built from the prod_id* sysfs fields, and the driver will be guessed from the modalias field.

Since we don't embed udev in stage1 yet and don't even have modprobe, I'll build a minimal PCMCIA alias table (out of modules.alias), that will allow to load the PCMCIA driver that matches the modalias field.