[Ksummit-2010-discuss] [v2] Remaining BKL users, what to do

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Tuesday 19 October 2010, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 October 2010 06:52:32 Dave Airlie wrote:
> > > I might be able to find some hardware still lying around here that uses an
> > > i810. Not sure unless I go hunting it. But I get the impression that if
> > > the kernel is a single-CPU kernel there is not any problem anyway? Don't
> > > distros offer a non-smp kernel as an installation option in case the user
> > > needs it? So in reality how big a problem is this?
> > 
> > Not anymore, which is my old point of making a fuss. Nowadays in the
> > modern distro world, we supply a single kernel that can at runtime
> > decide if its running on SMP or UP and rewrite the text section
> > appropriately with locks etc. Its like magic, and something like
> > marking drivers as BROKEN_ON_SMP at compile time is really wrong when
> > what you want now is a runtime warning if someone tries to hotplug a
> > CPU with a known iffy driver loaded or if someone tries to load the
> > driver when we are already in SMP mode.
> 
> We could make the driver run-time non-SMP by adding
> 
> 	if (num_present_cpus() > 1) {
> 		pr_err("i810 no longer supports SMP\n");
> 		return -EINVAL;
> 	}
> 
> to the init function. That would cover the vast majority of the
> users of i810 hardware, I guess.

Some research showed that Intel never support i810/i815 SMP setups,
but there was indeed one company (http://www.acorpusa.com at the time,
now owned by a domain squatter) that made i815E based dual Pentium-III
boards like this one: http://cgi.ebay.com/280319795096

The first person that can send me an authentic log file showing the
use of X.org with DRM on a 2.6.35 kernel with two processors on that
mainboard dated today or earlier gets a free upgrade to an AGP graphics
card of comparable or better 3D performance from me. Please include
the story how why you are running this machine with a new kernel.

i830 is harder, apparently some i865G boards support Pentium 4 with HT
and even later dual-core processors.

	Arnd