https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15174
--- Comment #16 from D. Hugh Redelmeier <h...@mimosa.com> 2010-03-24 07:11:54 --- [This response is a bit rambling. Sorry.] You say "it is reasonable that _PSS may ... end with some invalid entries". Why do you think that is reasonable? It seems like a BIOS bug to me. I would like Linux to be tolerant of BIOS bugs because we have no control over them. In particular, BIOS writers seem to stop fixing the code once Windows runs and Windows is apparently tolerant of a lot of BIOS bugs. I've reported BIOS bugs to manufacturers and have gotten no response. The safest approach is the status quo: if you see a bad entry, distrust the whole thing. After all: if an entry is wrong, how can you trust the BIOS writer to have gotten any of the entries right? I don't like that because it causes problems with my machine. My machine worked for years and years until the change to check for sanity of entries. That change was added (as I understand it) because the Intel code could crash the machine when it (later) tried to use a bad entry. The corresponding AMD code seems to check for sanity before actually using the value so it would not crash. My machine's CPU is AMD; is yours? The sanity checking that we're adjusting was added fairly recently so we don't know how many machines are affected like mine. The code only got to CentOS recently. You too seem to have an affected machine. Do you know of others? Are all the bad entries at the end of the table? The patch I proposed should be safe and it should maximize the number of broken BIOSes that the kernel will support. The simpler version which stops processing _PSS entries when the first bad one is encountered is not as general but it would support the only two examples I have of bad BIOSes (i.e. my machine and yours). On balance, I prefer the patch I proposed. I personally could live with the "accept entries until bad one encountered" version. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ acpi-bugzilla mailing list acpi-bugzilla@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/acpi-bugzilla
