The process of safely making delicate changes here is beyond my
responsibility as just a user - believe me, I'm not suggesting that a
risky fix be put in .24. I can patch my own kernels, and I can even
share an unofficial patch with others for now, or suggest that Fedora
and Ubuntu add it to their downstream.
May I make a small suggestion, though. If the decision is a DMI-keyed
switch from out-80 to udelay(2) gets put in, perhaps there should also
be a way for people to test their own configuration for the underlying
problem made available as a script. Though it is a "hack", all you
need to freeze a problem system is to run a loop doing about 1000 "cat
/dev/nvram > /dev/null" commands. If that leads to a freeze, one might
ask to have the motherboard added to the DMI-key list.
H. Peter Anvin wrote:
Ingo Molnar wrote:
* H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]> wrote:
Pavel Machek wrote:
this is also something for v2.6.24 merging.
As much as I like this patch, I do not think it is suitable for
.24. Too risky, I'd say.
No kidding! We're talking about removing a hack that has been
successful on thousands of pieces of hardware over 15 years because it
^----[*]
breaks ONE machine.
[*] "- none of which needs it anymore -"
there, fixed it for you ;-)
So lets keep this in perspective: this is a hack that only helps on a
very low number of systems. (the PIT of one PII era chipset is known
to be affected)
Yes, but the status quo has been *tested* on thousands of systems and
is known to work. Thus, changing it puts things into unknown
territory, even if only a small number of machines actually need the
current configuration.
Heck, there are only a small number of 386/486 machines still in
operation and being actively updated.
unfortunately this hack's side-effects are mis-used by an unknown
number of drivers to mask PCI posting bugs. We want to figure out
those bugs (safely and carefully) and we want to remove this hack
from modern machines that dont need it. Doing anything else would be
superstition.
anyway, we likely wont be doing anything about this in .24.
Again, 24 is "right out". 25 is a "maybe", IMO. Rene's fix could be
an exception, since it is a DMI-keyed workaround for a specific
machine and doesn't change behaviour in general.
-hpa
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