Re: Areca RAID driver remaining items?

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Thu Feb 23 2006 - 04:53:59 EST


On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 17:50 +0800, erich wrote:
> Dear Arjan van de Ven,
>
> The following contex is coming from comment of Christoph Hellwig.
>
> - msi should be a module options if at all, but defintitly not
> a config options
>
> #ifdef CONFIG_SCSI_ARCMSR_MSI
> if (!pci_enable_msi(pci_device))
> pACB->acb_flags |= ACB_F_HAVE_MSI;
> #endif
>
> I make an option config for prevent some mainboards hang up if arcmsr enable
> msi function.
> Areca RAID controller is bridged hardware.
> There were a lots of mainboards had wrong IRQ routing table issue with it.
> If somebody meet this issue and people can enable msi function to fix its
> hardware bug.
> But unfortunately I found some mainboards will hang up if I always enable
> this function in my lab.
> To avoid this issue, I do an option for this case.


yes the reason for making this optional is clear, and Christoph also
understands that.

However the idea that Christoph is proposing is to not make it a compile
time option, but a runtime option. Compile-time is not very flexible,
especially not for linux distributions. Making it a module option means
it becomes runtime behavior, and the user can load the module like

modprobe aerca msi=0

and msi gets turned off. No need to recompile anything! That has many
advantages over a more inflexible (from the user view) compiletime-only
option.


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