Re: [PATCH 01/30] disallow SERIAL_8250_PNP with SERIAL_8250_CONSOLE

Bjorn Helgaas
2009-03-25T23:04:41Z

On Tuesday 24 March 2009 04:58:12 pm Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 10:36:32PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:29:34 +0000
> > Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> > > I'd prefer not to go with this approach unless we've got a convincing
> > > number of bugs filed. It's guaranteed to reduce hardware support in
> > > favour of fixing an unknown number of machines.
> >
> > I get a regular stream of complaints. But as I said Red Hat is the patch
> > originator, Red Hat has the distro bugzilla so perhaps Red Hat folks can
> > comment ?
>
> I've had a dig through Bugzilla but couldn't find it, and it doesn't
> seem to be in anything we're shipping right now. Clark, do you have a
> pointer to a bug that this patch came from?

This patch is a major problem for ia64. ia64 doesn't have any legacy
serial port probing, so if we turn off SERIAL_8250_PNP, we won't find
any of the non-PCI built-in ports. Many of these machines have only
serial consoles, so turning off either SERIAL_8250_PNP or SERIAL_8250_CONSOLE
is a problem.

Red Hat has been shipping with ia64 kernels with CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_CONSOLE=y
and CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_PNP=y (or its predecessor CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_ACPI=y)
since at least RHEL4.

Bjorn