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SubjectRe: hardware problems
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>> Almost every report of this sort of thing has come down to faulty boards
>> or I/O. Almost - thats not every. Can you try and pin down things that make
>> a difference - eg disabling the PCI optimisation and 4Mb pages. Also if you
>> have a B stepping 100MHz pentium we need to know that.

Linux should detect and report the B stepping 100MHZ pentium.
Do it in bright blinking letters followed by a 1 second pause.

scream() anyone?

> While hardware problems are not specifically the fault of the linux
> kernel, people that run other OSes on the same hardware without problems
> will continue to lay blame on Linux as the culprit. Since Linux's
> acceptance has as much to do with perception as technical merit, these
> perceptions have risk. [Not to mention that some pride is at stake, who
> wants to be outdone by the engineers at Microsoft, even if only in an
> area as mundane as robustness?]
>
> It's great that Linux can and does excel at extracting lots of
> performance out of our "lowly" Intel boxes, but it seems that this has
> some price to it. Perhaps, a concerted effort to figure out how flakey
> hardware misbehaves, and some technique for working around these issues
> should be considered, if such work is not already underway.

Config option: ASSUME_QUALITY_HARDWARE

The Makefile links hardware.h to quality_hw.h or broken_hw.h.
These files have #defines for a variety of hardware options.
When you run 'make config', it only asks for one or the other.
This gives the newbie an easy way to create a reliable kernel,
and puts all the options in one file for experts who want to
customize for a particular machine.

I'm afraid the default should be reliable operation, using a link
to broken_hw.h. There are too many pieces of junk out there.
Maybe even assume i386 if broken_hw.h is selected.




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