Re: Stradis driver conflicts with all other SAA7146 drivers

[Christer Weinigel <christer@weinigel.se>]

Jiri Slaby <jirislaby@gmail.com> writes:

> Christer Weinigel napsal(a):
> > Hi,
> > 
> > [Nathan Laredo is the maintainer of the stradis driver but Jiri Slaby
> > submitted the PCI probing change that went into 2.6.16 so I'm Cc-ing
> > him too.  I'm not a member of the video4linux mailing list so please
> > Cc me on any responses.]
> > 
> > The stradis driver in the 2.6.16 kernel only looks at the SAA7146
> > vendor and product ID and binds to any SAA7146 based device even if it
> > is not a stradis card.  This stops all other SAA7146 drivers from
> > working, for example my WinTV Nova-T card using the budget-ci driver
> > doesn't work any longer.  A lot of other people have also been bitten
> > by this.

> The only difference is in order of searching for devices. Stradis now gets
> control before your "real" driver. Kick stradis from your config or blacklist
> it. Or, why you ever load module, you don't want to use?
> There is no change in searching devices, it didn't check for subvendors before
> not even now. If Nathan knows, there are some subvendor/subdevices ids, which we
> should compare to, then yes, we can change the behaviour, otherwise, I am
> afraid, we can't. It's vendors' problem, that they don't use this pci registers
> (and it's evil) -- i think, that stradis cards have that two zeroed.

I'm running the stock Fedora Core 5 kernels, and for some reason the
stradis driver is loaded.  I suppose there's some magic in the FC5
hotplug scripts that tries to load all device drivers that claim to
support a certain PCI device.

I have blacklisted the stradis driver on my system, which fixes it for
me, but it does feels as a workaround for a problem that ought to be
fixed in the driver.  If the card doesn't have a subvendor/subdevice,
is there some way of doing a sanity check on the board to see if it
actually is a stradis card and then release the board if it isn't?

If the driver isn't fixed I'll file a bug report on the Fedora
bugzilla asking them to blacklist or just not compile that driver.

  /Christer

-- 
"Just how much can I get away with and still go to heaven?"

Freelance consultant specializing in device driver programming for Linux 
Christer Weinigel <christer@weinigel.se>  http://www.weinigel.se