Re: floppy driver assumes INITIAL_JIFFIES == 0

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, 3 Jun 2010, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
>
> It seems it isn't related to initial jiffies. 
> Initializing the values (though a good idea), doesn't solve the
> problem. Still failed.  So dazed and confused, went back and reran
> kernel with jiffies=0 showed same problem, just took multiple boots
> to reproduce.

Ahh, ok. That really ends up limiting us. At least having a "it's related 
to jiffy wraparound" was a big clue. 

> So still a race that shows up with KVM (fast floppy?) and manifests
> as floppy_ready or reset_interrupt OOPS.

Yes, it's quite possible that the Linux floppy driver is simply broken by 
any floppy device that basically responds immediately to a command with an 
interrupt. And considering how few people use floppies, I do expect that 
driver to get _worse_ rather than better in the future.

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure it could be fixed. I'm just not sure that 
anybody is going to spend the effort.

I'd love to be proven wrong. Anybody?

		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/