Re: Plans for mISDN? Was: [PATCH 00/14] [ISDN] ...

[Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>]

Hi,

Tilman Schmidt wrote:

> mISDN has two problems, which are of course interrelated:

mISDN has one problem that is even bigger than these: the kernel oopses 
if modules aren't loaded in the right order. misdn-init works around 
that, but if it doesn't work for some reason (and I can think of 
multiple here), the user is left with a kernel that oopses during 
hardware discovery and never gets to a stage where this can be 
rectified, as almost all distributions now have hardware discovery 
before the first opportunity to get a shell. At least these were my 
experiences the last time I tried it on my test box.

This is the reason I've kept mISDN out of the last two Debian stable 
releases, despite users' requests.

When a hardware driver module is loaded, it should only do basic 
hardware initialisation; it is certainly not necessary to set up the 
entire stack (or even decide on a protocol, which currently needs to be 
handed in via module parameter -- before userland code is there that 
wants to talk to the hardware, there is no reason to have the hardware 
active).

    Simon