Re: EFI partition code broken..

From: Linus Torvalds (torvalds_at_osdl.org)
Date: 11/07/04

  • Next message: Gregoire Favre: "Why my computer freeze completely with xawtv ?" 
    Date:	Sun, 7 Nov 2004 14:41:02 -0800 (PST)
To: Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch@dell.com>

    On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Matt Domsch wrote:
    >
    > Another train of thought, and copying gregkh for inspiration. Is there
    > any way to know which devices lie about their size, and fix that with
    > quirk code in the device discovery routines?

    The USB layer actually has some quirks like this, but I think that's a
    bug waiting to happen.

    The thing is, if you start doing quirks, you _are_ screwed in the end.
    Don't do it. It's not just a maintenance nightmare, it's fundamentally
    wrong. It fundamentally takes the approach of "you have to have a kernel
    that is two years newer than the hardware you have", which is an approach
    that I just find incredibly broken.

    Quirks work slightly better in practice for stuff that seldom changes,
    and/or where we have fairly good vendor support. So CPU's, for example,
    are largely ok with quirks (aka "errata"). But random regular devices?
    Please no.

    Side note: the USB storage stuff has historically had tons of quirks,
    largely because the SCSI layer used to do crap-all to try to be sane. The
    SCSI layer historically only cared about high-end devices, and then the
    USB storage model clashed pretty hard with the old SCSI layer belief that
    standards are something that people follow etc.

    Happily, most of those quirks are hopefully stale these days, because the
    SCSI layer has been slowly converted to the idea that you don't use every
    documented feature under the sun just because it exists.

    So I'm trying to make for _fewer_ quirks rather than more of them.

                    Linus
    -
    To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
    the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
    More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
    Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

  • Next message: Gregoire Favre: "Why my computer freeze completely with xawtv ?"

    Relevant Pages