Re: Let's vote for PnP on 2.2 (Was: PnP in 2.2 ?)

[Brian Gerst]

Ralf Baechle wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Dec 08, 1997 at 02:45:54AM +0100, ther wrote:
> > On Sat, 6 Dec 1997, [ISO-8859-1] Iñaky Pérez González wrote:
> >
> > >         Your vote/opinion? :=)
> > vote ? when have we started to vote for stuff in the kernel ? i must have
> > missed some things... the last, i've seen, was Linus denying the GGI in
> > the kernel and myself screaming because this damn X server was
> > locking my workstation again and i've to login over the net to kill
> > the process.. the guy, who said linux is stable, was lieing..
> > sorry for this kernel-policital mail..
> 
> So complain to the xfree people or whereever else you got your X server
> from.  The kernel didn't barf => no bug in Linux.

Maybe not a bug, but an inherent design flaw.  Allowing user mode
programs direct access to the hardware causes these kind of problems
because the kernel does not know the state of the hardware if the
program crashes.  X and SVGAlib, when active, tell the kernel not to
mess with the video card and keyboard at all.  If they crash, the kernel
is left with that lock enabled, leaving the console unusable.  This is
the root of the problem and is what GGI intends to solve.

-- 

						Brian Gerst