Re: 2.6.20 instability

[Paul M. <pau...@re...>]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 11:48:43AM +0100, Manuel Lauss wrote:
> I don't run -git kernels so patch 1 is not applied anyway and
> without patch 2 the situation is much worse: 
> Kernel oopses every time a pcmcia ethernet card is inserted
> (cf cards are not affected or much less frequently).
> The difference is that for the ethernet card io ports are allocated
> starting from 0x300, while the cf card io ports start at 0x0.
> Also, the oops does not occur if the ethernet card is already in the
> socket when kernel boots. I can then also reapeatedly eject/insert
> it without problems.
> 
Can you post the log of the oops?

> > We're still not quite all the way there with the kmap_coherent() stuff
> > (and the move to copy_user_highpage()), so that's still going to take a
> > bit of work. While I think most of the page colouring problems are now
> > taken care of, it seems in the PG_dcache_dirty route we're _still_
> > missing some flushing that seems to break in certain paths regardless of
> > the kmap state.
> 
> I guess I should study the mm code more closely to understand all that :)
> 
The PG_dcache_dirty problem ended up being related to the fact that we
were just doing less flushing, which was causing troubles for IDE PIO in
the outsw()/insw() cases, adding some explicit dcache handling there like
we had for CONFIG_IDE fixed up those issues, so it's likely not related
to the problem you're seeing. Though that does seem to be the last
outstanding issue for PG_dcache_dirty..

Now the kmap mess is next on the list..

> What logs do you need?
> 
It would be interesting to know for starters whether your oops is IRQ
related or not? Any sort of debug output you can provide would be useful.
Oopsing if the card isn't available at boot time is certainly something
we need to fix.