Make "pci=nomsi" the default on 2.6.20 kernels?

Dave Jones davej at redhat.com
Fri Mar 30 18:21:22 UTC 2007


On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 02:03:23PM -0400, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
 > Pete Zaitcev wrote:
 > > On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:00:12 -0400, Chuck Ebbert <cebbert at redhat.com> wrote:
 > > 
 > >> It seems like more and more problems with PCI MSI are turning up
 > >> in the 2.6.20 kernel. Discussion upstream concluded that maybe
 > >> it should have been off by default in 2.6.20, so maybe we should
 > >> just do that in Fedora and make people who want it use "pci=msi"
 > >> to enable it? It's probably not going to be really stable until
 > >> 2.6.22...
 > > 
 > > I have a laptop (Dell 1501) where hard drive does not work unless MSI
 > > is off. It's not hard to add pci=nomsi, and Grubby copies it to new
 > > kernel's command line, but the downside is, it took me a day to figure
 > > out what was wrong. It completely looked like a garden variety SATA
 > > failure. Maybe we want to keep it on in Rawhide and publicise "look
 > > at /proc/interrupts, check if count is zero"?
 > 
 > I was thinking more about FC6 where people are upgrading to 2.6.20
 > and finding systems don't work that used to work. For FC7 it's
 > debatable since MSI is mostly fixed in 2.6.21, but I think I will
 > switch it off in FC6.

Gets my vote too.
I've turned off CONFIG_PCI_MSI and turned it back on about 2-3 times
now for FC5/FC6, because each time it starts to look more promising,
it seems to find new ways to regress.

I might do a build next week in rawhide with it off again too,
to see if any oddball bugs fall out.

	Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk




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