Re: [9fans] IRQs again...

[Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Tue, 28 May 2002, David Gordon Hogan wrote:

> Do you actually have a hot-swappable cPCI system, or
> is this all hypothetical?

I've got one, plan to get more, and would like to fix this. Plus the one I
have (www.cluster-labs.de) is full of nodes that ONLY run linuxbios. You
can't run a legacy bios. So we've got to fix this for our own uses.
Otherwise everything just keeps running Linux.

I'm willing to fix this in linuxbios, in fact I started to, just for Plan
9. What stopped me cold was looking at all the corner cases -- it seems no
matter what we do we'll always be doing something wrong for some
configurations -- not even versions, configurations -- of some OSes. Ouch.
I think this is why Linux has started ignoring a lot of the BIOS settings
and just does its own.

> I think our main reason is that (we think) we've got better
> things to do.

That's a good reason. I mean that. There's always too much work. I was
worried that there was a technical gotcha.

> So the `guessing' code probably isn't used all that often.

Except in our lab ... where it is used a lot and does seem to do ok.

> But, by all means, don't let me stop you from adding hot
> swap support to the kernel :-)

Works for me. We'll see what we can do.

Thanks.

ron