Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 29 Jul 1998 15:19:06 -0400 | From | "Kristofer T. Karas" <> | Subject | Re: 2.1.111: IDE DMA disabled? |
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Linus writes: >I don't need to "measure" it. >I have a very clear report of a person who could reproduce the behaviour >at will.
So can I, on the P6DLE motherboard now collecting dust as I have too many paperweights as it is. I can make IDE-DMA fail within an hour of moderate use. And if I plug in an AGP graphics board, I can make that fail in seconds. Both use bus-master DMA. Should I then disable all attempts to use the AGP port in configurable software?
If I replace a DIMM with a slower, weaker variety, I can make GCC fail with error 11's without much effort. Does that mean I should disable all use of GCC on my machine? Good heavens, no!
For each instance where you're seeing stodgy hardware, where a user can reproduce an IDE-DMA bug, I'm sure there are an equal or greater number of instances where users have no problems. In another post I made to Mark, I noted that sometimes it takes a particular piece of software to trigger a hardware defect; mingo experimentally found a fix that works in his case for no obvious reason. My current P2B-DS motherboard works just fine with IDE-DMA and SMP too, though it's only been two weeks under test.
A greater than average number of hardware failures due to some piece of functionality is a good reason to disable it "by default" in software. But Mark is right that you're not going to be able to find and squash subtler bugs until you get a sizeable population enabling the feature and testing; and to do that, you must provide a means by which people can enable it. If you've disabled the functionality in the kernel as you have in 2.1.111+, then you can't enable it with hdparm. This is at least partly what Mark's (rightfully) complaining about.
Kris -- Kristofer Karas * Senior systems engineer/SysAdmin AMA/CCS DoD RF900RR HawkGT !car * BI Deaconess Medical Center, Boston "Build a system that even a fool can use, * http://ktk.bidmc.harvard.edu/~ktk/ and only a fool will want to use it." * Will design LISP machines for food
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