Re: Device Driver Etiquette

[Matt Fredrickson <creslin@digium.com>]

----- "Daniel J Blueman" <daniel.blueman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1 Jun, 19:40, "Lee Revell" <rlrevell@joe-job.com> wrote:
> > On 6/1/07, Matthew Fredrickson <creslin@digium.com> wrote:
> >
> > > is it acceptable (although
> > > not nice) to simply fix it this way, by disabling irqs while it
> loads
> > > the firmware?
> >
> > I would say to just disable IRQs while loading firmware.  Almost
> every
> > server I maintain has some vendor driver which generates a "many
> lost
> > ticks!" message on load.  As long as it's only done at module load
> > time it should be fine.
> 
> For anything ~10s or more, you'll probably also need to call the
> timer
> update function to prevent soft lockup warning being generated.

Ahhh... so there is a way to get rid of that cursed message.  I forgot to mention this in my original message, the only place that I had seen this problem is on a certain machine (Dell 2950) with a certain distribution (FC6) kernel.  I had trimmed the code down to fit in 4K stacks already quite a bit.

I believe what actually made it crash and overflow the stack (the straw that breaks the camels back, so to speak) was the intermittent triggering of the softlockup detector.  I think if I can disable that while the firmware is loading that will fix the stack overflow issues and correct my problem.

Matthew Fredrickson