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

Simon Richter
2008-02-21T11:04:50Z

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