spca5xx freezes system

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com>

| I agree that this could still point to a driver bug.  I asked the
| developer whether he had verified if his driver works with the
| 'official' gnu gcc-4.1, and he stated that he had not.

Did you ask this on the spca50x-devs list?  That is probably the best
place to discuss this.  It should be better than private mail to the
developer because other users can join in.  It should be better than
mail to this list since it is more appropriately specialized.  But it
would great to tell us how this works out.

A quick look at that list shows a certain amount of bad behaviour on
the part of this driver.

Archive:
  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=spca50x-devs

Scary thread:
  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=9976551&forum_id=32

One FC5 thread (there are others):
  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10186347&forum_id=32

|  I will be
| unlikely to have time in the near future (within the next few weeks at
| least) to rebuild a kernel against gcc-3.2 to verify his claim.  So,
| if someone else has the time, please let us know how it works out.

I don't think that it make sense to use GCC-3.2.  Red Hat did their QA
using 4.x and other parts of the Fedora kernel may break with 3.2.

It makes more sense to use GCC4.x without -O.  But just for the
driver.  Surely you can build the driver without building the kernel.

I must admit that the following message disturbs me.  Building a
driver should not require write access to the kernel source tree.
  tom1:/usr/src/spca5xx-20060301# make
   Building SPCA5XX driver for 2.5/2.6 kernel.
   Remember: you must have read/write access to your kernel source tree.
This was extracted from
  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10001199&forum_id=32