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Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 20:32:39 +0200
From: Gunther.Mayer@t-online.de (Gunther Mayer)
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To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: yenta_socket hangs sager laptop in kernel 2.4.6-> PNPBIOS life saver
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Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > Try -ac Kernels with integrated PNPBIOS and "lspnp -v",
> > then you will see your "motherboard resources". No magic.
> 
> Except on the intel boards where your machine crashes, the vaio's where
> some queries corrupt memory, the boxes where an interrupt during a pnpbios
> call crashes the box, the machines where pnpbios called from both cpus at
> the same time is a crash case, the wonderful weird tiny races on some boxes
> that use smm traps and fail if random undefined things occur between the
> two out instructions...

So call it only once early on boot (in real mode) and save the table
for later use (we don't need the fancy features ...) ?

> > Alan, 2.4 would largely benefit from PNPBIOS, do you plan
> > to submit this to LT (probably with the proposed life saver fix) ?
> 
> Experience is that PnpBIOS services are so astoundingly buggy in many
> bioses that they are probably not worth the risk. Ie more boxes break by
> calling pnpbios than by assuming the vendor used a sane resource layout.

How are these bugs handled by Windows ?
Must we only mimick the Windows call layout to
enter bios-writer's well tested code path ?

> Before PnPBIOS can go mainstream we'd have to generate a detailed list
> of buggy bios signatures