Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 6 Aug 2003 16:35:27 -0700 | From | David Hinds <> | Subject | Re: [PROBLEM] xircom CBE2-100(faulty) hangs kernel 2.4.{21, 22-pre8} (fwd) |
| |
On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 03:55:02PM -0500, Hmamouche, Youssef wrote: > > I'm a user. When I insert a card "into my laptop" I'd like it to > work as advertised. If it doesn't work as advertised(because of some > hardware failure in this case), I'd like the kernel to more or less > let me know that something went wrong so I can return it. I wouldn't > expect the kernel to freeze.
I accept this...
> Faulty hardware is very common in the PC era. I agree that it is > hard to pin down hardware malfunctions when you don't know what to > check for. However, There should be concern when it takes your whole > system down.
I'd agree, that drivers should be made to not screw up when an unexpected condition arises, where that's possible. Like, not crashing the OS if a device returns an unexpected value.
This particular problem (what seems to be an unacknowledged interrupt, but that could be a symptom of something else) is troublesome and likely impossible for the driver to detect and handle sanely. Because PCI interrupts are shared, and a driver cannot assume that its device was responsible for any particular interrupt.
I believe that the 2.6 kernel provides a general central mechanism for detecting and throttling unacknowledged interrupts, if that really is the problem. That's where this particular fix belongs, not in the driver (and every other driver).
-- Dave
- 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/
| |