Re: New MTRR fix for 2.1.120-pre3

Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Fri, 4 Sep 1998 09:49:33 +1000


Linus Torvalds writes:
>
>
> On Fri, 4 Sep 1998, Richard Gooch wrote:
> >
> > BTW, Linus: I haven't heard anything from you about my recent
> > patch. Is there something you don't like about it?
>
> I'd like the rest, but I really think you should ditch the queuing up: I
> thought it was a console driver bug that was responsible, but people
> showed me the error of my ways and I fixed the bootup order, and I'd
> rather not have extra code to handle something I think was fundamentally
> flawed (but that we happened to do for bad reasons).

Hm. Well, the reason I'd like to leave the queueing code there is
because perhaps at some point in the future something may need to call
mtrr_add() before smp_begin(). So I see it as future proofing.
Also, the cost is essentially 0, as the queue is freed by
free_initmem(). So to me it doesn't seem like kernel bloat.

However, if you insist, I'll rip out the queueing code and replace it
with printk()s telling you that you can't call mtrr_add() yet. I think
it's worth having the warning (generating a lockup or an OOPS is
probably not a good idea: you should at least warn people about what's
wrong if possible).
Note that the cost of the warnings (post free_initmem()) is the
dominant factor to kernel bloat here :-)

Regards,

Richard....

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