Re: iwlagn: associating with AP causes kernel hiccup

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 6:12 PM, Tomas Winkler <tomasw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 5:18 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Richard Scherping wrote:

Tomas Winkler schrieb:


Amen.
Stable doesn't mean all components are stable, citation from Linus blog:
"It doesn't have to be perfect (and obviously no release ever is), but
it needs to be in reasonable shape"

The fact is that some critical patches were rejected as not
regressions in rc cycle and probably need to be pushed to the stable
version now or distribution will merge them.
We gave more priority for testing 32 bit version so it is more stable
then 64 bit which got much less in house testing and we've missed many
issues there. The driver doesn't get full exposure till it's get to
the public in stable version therefore no bugs are opened in the rc
cycle so also are not fixed in the stable version. and unfortunately
there is no much system testing at all for what get's into merging
window.
Second the whole mac80211 stack didn't address fully MQ rewrite so
it's a bit shaky as well and this will be fact also in 2.6.28.

OK.


This driver has been available and more-or-less working for ages.
What kernel am I supposed to run if I just want a stable system? Haven't
found one yet, other than distro kernels...

In any case, I've seen these complete system hiccups with iwl4965 and iwlagn
since at least 2.6.25 and through quite a few wireless-testing versions. I
bet that this, along with things like it, is the culprit:

Haven't seen you've filled bug for it.

Fair enough. #1790.


Locking need to be really revised but till now I didn't see show
stoppers issues so it didn't get priority

Would I be out of line for wishing the iwlwifi developers
Patches are always welcome

I can write a patch to add a mutex and change it to:

take mutex
grab_nic
spinlock

but I bet that would break all kinds of things. :)

--Andy
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