Messages in this thread | | | From | Albert Cahalan <> | Subject | Re: hardware problems | Date | Tue, 9 Apr 1996 18:52:54 -0400 (EDT) |
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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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