Re: MPlayer broken under 2.6.15-rc7-rt1?

Arjan van de Ven
2006-01-01T13:28:53Z

On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 13:12 +0100, jerome lacoste wrote:
> On 1/1/06, Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > DO YOU REALLY PREFER USERS NOT REPORT BUGS?
>
> [...]
>
> > So getting back to your question:
> > I would say that I think it's generally better that bugs that cannot be
> > reproduced on an untainted kernel are not reported on lkml, but reported
> > to the vendor of the tainting module instead, simply because it's very
> > likely that it'll waste precious debug time.
>
> Although I like the idea of making the vendors of binary modules
> really aware of the costs they introduce with regard to debug issues
> on tainted system, if I was them, the first thing I would say is
> "contact the vendor of the part of the system that changed", i.e. the
> kernel.

btw you do have a point; should nvidia care if someone patches their
kernel with the -rt patchkit, something which changes many rules inside
the kernel. I'm actually surprised such binary modules work *at all*
given how many of the rules have changed. (For source-compiled modules
it's a bit less of a surprise since the api changes get compiled
through, eg most of the cases the API stayed the same the ABI didn't ,
for binary ones.. that only works if you're lucky I guess. Even for
source modules several needed changes (just look at the -rt patchkit) ).

To some degree, if you use binary modules and experimental patches, you
are on your own; the module vendor is unlikely to care, but so are most
of the developers of the patchkits.. (after all.. there is a good reason
-rt has different rules, that is the whole POINT of the -rt patches,
different rules to achieve the goal of extremely low latencies)