Re: [patch] revert "dcdbas: add DMI-based module autloading"

Kay Sievers
2008-03-08T18:16:42Z

On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 09:22 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Frank Sorenson <frank@tuxrocks.com> wrote:
>
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Frank Sorenson wrote:
> > > I did some additional debugging, and I believe you're correct about it
> > > being specific to my system. The system seems to run fine until some
> > > time during the boot. I booted with "init=/bin/sh" (that's how the
> > > system stayed up for 9 minutes), then it died when I tried starting
> > > things up. I've further narrowed the OOM down to udev (though it's not
> > > entirely udev's fault, since 2.6.24 runs fine).
> > >
> > > I ran your debug info tool before killing the box by running
> > > /sbin/start_udev. The output of the tool is at
> > > http://tuxrocks.com/tmp/cfs-debug-info-2008.03.06-14.11.24
> > >
> > > Something is apparently happening between 2.6.24 and 2.6.25-rc[34] which
> > > causes udev (or something it calls) to behave very badly.
> >
> > Found it. The culprit is 8f47f0b688bba7642dac4e979896e4692177670b
> > dcdbas: add DMI-based module autloading
> >
> > DMI autoload dcdbas on all Dell systems.
> >
> > This looks for BIOS Vendor or System Vendor == Dell, so this should
> > work for systems both Dell-branded and those Dell builds but brands
> > for others. It causes udev to load the dcdbas module at startup,
> > which is used by tools called by HAL for wireless control and
> > backlight control, among other uses.
> >
> > What actually happens is that when udev loads the dcdbas module at
> > startup, modprobe apparently calls "modprobe dcdbas" itself, repeating
> > until the system runs out of resources (in this case, it OOMs).
>
> nice work! I've attached the revert below against latest -git - just in
> case no-one can think of an obvious fix to this bug.

Frank, can you grep for 'dcdbas' in the modprobe config files:
modprobe -c | grep dcdbas
?

I wonder what's going on here, that modprobe calls itself.

Thanks,
Kay