Re: [PATCH 1/2] longhaul: Mark it as dangerous in Kconfig

On Sun, 2014-06-08 at 20:02 -0400, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 09, 2014 at 12:20:42AM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
>  > longhaul quickly caused hard lockups and possibly killed the memory
>  > module on my EPIA-PD board.  It is commented as:
>  > 
>  > 'BIG FAT DISCLAIMER: Work in progress code. Possibly *dangerous*'
> 
> that last part may have been overly dramatic. When I was originally
> writing this driver I was using pre-production cpu's which were
> marginal to begin with. Production hw should have been more tolerant.
> What didn't help was a lot of the EPIAs were made with *Really*
> shitty capacitors that would pop open and ooze over the boards. Might want
> to eyeball those, you can usually tell when they've gone bad.

I threw the board out last year, but didn't notice any such damage.  The
failure occurred *immediately* after I loaded the driver (when
auto-loading was enabled), while the board had been stable for several
years up to that point.  And the board started working again after I
replaced the memory module and prevented the driver from loading.  Of
course, it *could* just be coincidence that the memory went bad then.  I
didn't feel like testing that!

Activation of the driver is now guarded by a module parameter, so even
with auto-loading enabled it doesn't do any damage by default.

Ben.

>  > Let's put another warning where people are more likely to see it.
> 
> That said, I'm not against itbeing marked BROKEN (I thought it
> already was), and certainly don't recommend distros enabling it.
> 
> I'd also not stand in the way of someone throwing it out completely
> given the small amount of systems out there likely still running this.
> 
> 	Dave
> 

-- 
Ben Hutchings
One of the nice things about standards is that there are so many of them.

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