Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 19 May 2001 22:27:37 +0200 | From | Axel Thimm <> |
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On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 05:11:30PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > This are the latest suggestions for handling the VIA Southbridge bug as > > derived from the hardware site www.au-ja.de (Many thanks to doelf). > > I'd rather people left this except for the obvious fixed that were done for > non VIA northbridge combinations until 2.5. 2.4 is not an appropriate place > to play with possibly disk corrupting PCI hacks without documentation. > > What is pathetic is that VIA have yet to place anything in the public domain > giving correct workarounds. People are picking at BIOSes praying to spot all > the changes (which may not be in the PCI registers even) because a vendor > hasn't got the decency to admit they screwed up and then to issue proper > fixes
these are my feelings, too. But I try to be an optimist - this is the reason for the extended Cc: list, maybe it might trigger some change of those politics. Note that Yiping Chen <YipingChen@via.com.tw> had contacted this list a few weeks ago to ask how to contribute drivers to Linux, indicating perhaps a first step towards VIA going public domain.
Placing more documentation in the public domain would also help Linux construct the right pirq routing tables, which is also a showstopper for certain KT133A setups.
> If it had been a manufacturer in most respectable areas of business they'd > be recalling and reissuing components, and paying for the end resllers to > notify each customer
Let's hope VIA will indeed change politics. Either the bug is not fixable and VIA should recall, or the bug/fix should be cleanly documented. Currently VIA is hoping to survive this fiasco by not drawing too much attention ("it was the SB"), but this may become a boomerang (I for my part will try to have the motherboard replaced after having been haunted for the last 6 weeks).
At the very end there are us, the user, who would not want to wait for 2.5 (speak 2.6 for the common user ...). Of course Linux is not to blame, but it is indeed a big user community hit by this.
Regards, Axel. -- Axel.Thimm@physik.fu-berlin.de - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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