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[Lonni J Friedman]

On 8/14/06, Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
> Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>
> > Yup, that would be the horrific instability that I'm referring to.
> > According to the developer "it works fine in SuSE-10.1, so it can't be
> > a driver bug".
>
> Fedora kernels do get mentioned as being patched out of normalcy on a
> couple of driver sites.  But some of the times at least the complaints
> are hiding the real problem.  Like the ADSL PCI Modem I tried to get
> working for a friend, the driver refused to compile because Fedora
> kernels have CONFIG_REGPARM enabled.  This is a very innocuous compiler
> option for the kernel, the driver docs said since it was enabled on FC3
> the driver is just flat out broken with Fedora.  It turns out the reason
> was that the driver relied on a proprietary but evidently distributable
> binary blob, which was not itself compiled with CONFIG_REGPARM and so
> could not have its contents called reliably from code that was compiled
> under CONFIG_REGPARM.
>
> So although it must sometimes be true that Fedora's patches cause
> trouble, I am a bit dubious now when I read it mentioned early on in a
> driver's docs... too bad the guy didn't suggest adding printk's etc to
> find out more.


I didn't buy his claims of it being a FC kernel bug, so I built a
kernel.org kernel, and the problem persisted, at which point he
claimed it had to be gcc-4.x.  So I rebuilt the kernel with gcc-3.x,
and that did fix the problem, however I noted that gcc-4.x wasn't that
experimental, and he'd need to fix his driver to work with it
eventually.  Then he started claiming that the problem was actually a
lack of 8k stacks in the FC5 x86 kernels.  That was ridiculous seeing
as how kernel.org kernels don't have an option for changing the stack
size in 32bit kernels either.  At that point, he just stopped replying
to my emails.  I don't think he really understood how to debug the
problem, or perhaps he just didn't care and was stringing me along.
Either way, spca5xx is bad news.


-- 
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       http://netllama.linux-sxs.org