Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> On 8 Jan 2003, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>
>>Followup to: <Pine.LNX.3.95.1030108132812.28791A-100000@chaos.analogic.com>
>>By author: "Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>
>>In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>>
>>>The problem is that he's discovered something that's not supposed
>>>to be in the code. Only 32-bit accesses are supposed to be made to
>>>the PCI controller ports. He has discovered that somebody has made
>>>some 8-bit accesses that will not become configuration 'transactions'
>>>because they are not 32 bits.
>>>
>>
>>Right. That's what the code is checking for.
>>
>> -hpa
>
> Somebody is very lucky the designer of the bus interface state-machine
> let him get away with it. This is a borderline "insane instruction" that
> could, on some (future?) machine, require a power-off to recover. This is
> NotGood(tm). It's like testing a fuse by shorting out a circuit. If it
> works, the circuit no longer works. If I doesn't, the circuit no longer
> works. Some things should not be tested.
>
If so, we will get an bug report rather than mysterious strange
behaviour. This is a good thing. (Amusingly enough, exactly this code
in the Linux kernel actually found a bug in one of the very early
versions of the Transmeta northbridge. It was fixed in firmware.)
-hpa
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 22:00:24 EST