On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Jean-Marc Saffroy wrote:
> We have here an older SMP machine (NCR Globalyst S40, quad Pentium 100)
> with an Intel Xtended Xpress (or XXPRESS) motherboard, and all development
> kernels since 2.3.20 don't boot with SMP on it, because they panic when
> they discover a bus type they don't know ("XPRESS") when parsing the bus
> entries in the MP Configuration Table.
Hmm, I guess panic() is there for two reasons. First to avoid booting on
a machine we may have trouble to handle. Second to make people with such
hardware contact us (like you did ;-) ).
While you may surely use your patch for now, I don't think it's good as a
general solution. I think we should either handle all busses (some of
them were never actually used for i386 machines) or leave the code as is.
By handling of all busses I mean not to choke on them unless there is an
interrupt entry referring to such a bus. This would fullfill the first
reason but not the second one. That wouldn't be a major failure, I
suppose, as we are not collectors of hardware configuration specs anyway
(anyone?).
I'll provide real code, but due to a vacation no earlier than after the
following week. Anyone feel free to work on it earlier. ;-)
Would you please check if your MP table really makes use of the XPRESS
bus or does it just define it? Or send me your MP table if you prefer me
to do the analysis (it's dumped at the very beginning of the bootstrap log
-- you may need to specify `dmesg -s 32768' to get that part).
Maciej
-- + Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland + +--------------------------------------------------------------+ + e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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