Re: Delete drivers/pci/syscall.c?

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Tue Oct 19 2004 - 10:08:45 EST




On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>
> Linus, I noticed you touching drivers/pci/syscall.c which made me look
> a bit more carefully at that file. It is broken for machines with
> overlapping PCI bus numbers in separate domains. There's basically no
> way to fix this unless we encode the domain into the upper bits of the
> bus number.
>
> The information is already available through /proc and /sys. It's hooked
> into the syscall tables of alpha, arm, ia64, ppc, ppc64, sparc and
> sparc64. Whatever's using those syscalls must have some kind of backup
> strategy for grovelling around in files.

While the system calls may be broken in theory (multiple domains) they are
not broken in practice (single-domain workstations), and they _were_ used
by X, at least on alpha last time I looked.

And no, expectign X to have a fallback and to understand multiple domains
is likely not a valid expectation.

So right now X may work only on single-domain setups, or on setups where
the video card has a unique address when ignoring the domnain number.
That's pretty much all of the affected machines, so no, I don't think we
can/should remove it.

Will X eventually learn about multiple domains? Maybe.

Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/