[RFC] [PATCH 2/2] kdump: cciss driver initialization issue fix

[vgoyal at in.ibm.com (Vivek Goyal)]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 07:41:00AM +0530, Maneesh Soni wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 11:13:44AM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > Vivek Goyal <vgoyal at in.ibm.com> writes:
> > 
> > > On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 04:30:46AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > >
> > >> > Or is there a generic way to handle these situations? Fixing them driver
> > >> > by driver is a long painful process. 
> > >> 
> > >> Some generic way of whacking a PCI device via the standard PCI registers? 
> > >> Not that I know of.
> > >
> > > Somebody hinted that think of PCI bus reset. But I think PCI bus reset will
> > > require firware/BIOS to export a hook to software to so initiate PCI bus
> > > reset and I don't think many platforms do that. Infact I am not even aware
> > > of one platform who does that.
> > 
> > Not all pci busses support it but there is a standard pci bus reset bit
> > in pci bridges.
> > 
> > I don't know if it would help but it might make sense to have a config
> > option that can be used to mark drivers that are known to have problems,
> > in these scenarios.
> > 
> > CONFIG_BRITTLE_INIT perhaps?
> > 
> > It would at least make it easier for people to see which drivers
> > they don't want to use, and give people some incentive to fix things.
> > 
> 
> Vivek, 
> 
> I think having something as Eric suggested instead of crashboot= is better.
> We can hve this config option set for kernel like dump capture
> kernel. (CONFIG_CRASH_DUMP=y). This should save some bytes on already longish
> kdump kernel boot paramenters.
> 

Maneesh, Keeping this code under a config option becomes a problem when we
will have a relocatable kernel. At some point of time we got to have
relocatable kernel so that people don't have to build two kernels. In fact
this is becoming a pain area for distros. That's the reason I thought
of making it a command line parameter.

I remember few months back, Eric had mentioned that he has got patches for
relocatable kernel ready for review for i386 and x86_64. Eric, do you have
any plans to post the patches for review?

Thanks
Vivek