I share your interest in this situation albeit with different hardware.
Solutions to this requirement fall into two big chunks.
- When the dock gets connected or removed, all of the hardware must make itself known to the host OS.
- When the OS learns about the hardware, appropriate 'detect' and 'configure' operations must happen.
There are other chunks in the behavior field surrounding these larger topics.
Foremost is the need for a dock and
its connected parts to implement power-on connection and removal from the host workstation. A dock with a CD/DVD drive is a notorious culprit, here.
While the 'drive' hardware exists, the 'device' lives in a sort of limbo until one adds either
CD or DVD media to the drive. Insert media... platter run-up... 'device' detected and configured...
events happen based on media content and other configuration. The reverse happens when you eject
the media. The issue gets further complicated when the CD/DVD drive is a gadget one can exchange
with HDD, SSD, FDD, batteries or other types of hardware.
All of this sort of thing is wrapped into packages for ACPI, UDEV, DBUS, and other aspects of whichever distro you decide to use. Do you get good driver support for your hardware versus these packages?
Can you discover the hardware details and manually create any configuration for items that are not
detected automatically or not correctly or completely configured?
Please keep us informed,
~~~ 0;-Dan