Re: [RFC] floppy: use single threaded workqueue

From: david
Date: Thu Jul 22 2010 - 18:23:27 EST


I don't use floopies much anymore, but I've got a fair number of machines around that have floppy drives (purchased across about 6 years with from a couple vendors and a variety of motherboards)

If someone can go to the effort of documenting what testing you want done I may be able to do it.

I would be installing new builds onto the machines to test them, so you can do testing that locks up the boxes without impacting anything.

the easier it is to do the tests, the more machines I can test on (bootable CD images that I could just pop in and then check the screen later would be ideal ;-)

these systems will not have network access.

David Lang


On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Can confirm this fixes the following oops seen under KVM guests.

BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000000000000035

Hmm. That does make me want to merge it early, but at the same time I
suspect it has gotten almost no testing on real hardware. So despite
looking "obvious" and fixing one bug, I'm a bit nervous and I suspect
that the prudent thing to do is still to take it early in the 2.3.36
merge window, and just mark it for stable.

Is anybody a big floppy user (on _real_ hardware, preferably with more
than a couple machines) and could test it? I do feel kind of stupid
for not taking it, but I don't have the hardware or the interest in
really installing any in my current machines, and even if it looks
fine and fixes some issue, I just don't feel safe enough without some
more confirmation... As far as I know, the floppy oops thing has
_only_ been seen on KVM (likely due to timing that just doesn't happen
on real hardware), and while the KVM floppy emulation is probably
fairly good, it also clearly isn't equivalent to hardware.

Linus
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