On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 02:36:25PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> > I would appreciate if someone would explain me if the attached patch
> > does the right thing. The problem is that I do not use the framebuffer,
> > and use a serial console. Whenever a legacy /sbin/init tries to
> > open /dev/tty0, the system oopses dereferencing conswitchp in
> > visual_init().
>
> And this worked before?
I was simillary surprised when it happened (between 2.5.25 and 2.5.26 if
my memory serves correctly).
> conswitchp must never be NULL, say `conswitchp = &dummy_con;' in your setup.c
> if you have a serial console.
No, it does not work that way for very loooong... Just remove VGA device from
your box, VGA con_startup will fail and conswitchp will become NULL... And
in 2.5.26 more than 50% of archs (including i386) does not use dummy_con, it
leaves conswitchp uninitialized (== NULL).
> > diff -ur -X dontdiff linux-2.5.30-sp_pbk/drivers/char/console.c linux-2.5.30-sparc/drivers/char/console.c
> > --- linux-2.5.30-sp_pbk/drivers/char/console.c Thu Aug 1 14:16:34 2002
> > +++ linux-2.5.30-sparc/drivers/char/console.c Sun Aug 18 23:14:20 2002
> > @@ -652,7 +652,7 @@
> >
> > int vc_allocate(unsigned int currcons) /* return 0 on success */
> > {
> > - if (currcons >= MAX_NR_CONSOLES)
> > + if (currcons >= MAX_NR_CONSOLES || conswitchp == NULL)
> > return -ENXIO;
> > if (!vc_cons[currcons].d) {
> > long p, q;
In 2.5.25 con_init and vty_init was one function, which checked conswitchp == NULL
at beginning. In 2.5.26 it was spilt down, and vty_init does no conswitchp checking,
it blindly registers console tty driver. Proper fix is putting
if (!conswitchp) return;
at the beginning of vty_init(), unless we support hotplug tty. If we support hotplug tty,
then your fix is probably correct, but it needs deeper inspection, as no tty code
ever expected conswitchp == NULL.
Petr Vandrovec
vandrove@vc.cvut.cz
-
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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 23 2002 - 22:00:18 EST