On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 03:55:02PM -0500, Hmamouche, Youssef wrote:
>
> I'm a user. When I insert a card "into my laptop" I'd like it to
> work as advertised. If it doesn't work as advertised(because of some
> hardware failure in this case), I'd like the kernel to more or less
> let me know that something went wrong so I can return it. I wouldn't
> expect the kernel to freeze.
I accept this...
> Faulty hardware is very common in the PC era. I agree that it is
> hard to pin down hardware malfunctions when you don't know what to
> check for. However, There should be concern when it takes your whole
> system down.
I'd agree, that drivers should be made to not screw up when an
unexpected condition arises, where that's possible. Like, not
crashing the OS if a device returns an unexpected value.
This particular problem (what seems to be an unacknowledged interrupt,
but that could be a symptom of something else) is troublesome and
likely impossible for the driver to detect and handle sanely. Because
PCI interrupts are shared, and a driver cannot assume that its device
was responsible for any particular interrupt.
I believe that the 2.6 kernel provides a general central mechanism for
detecting and throttling unacknowledged interrupts, if that really is
the problem. That's where this particular fix belongs, not in the
driver (and every other driver).
-- Dave
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 07 2003 - 22:00:36 EST