FS#6974 - ACPI Modularisation is broken by concept.

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by James Rayner (iphitus) - Sunday, 22 April 2007, 09:21 GMT
Last edited by Tobias Powalowski (tpowa) - Sunday, 22 April 2007, 13:41 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Kernel
Status Closed
Assigned To Tobias Powalowski (tpowa)
Architecture i686
Severity Critical
Priority High
Reported Version 0.8 Voodoo
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Why wasnt this put into testing first at least?

As we can see from the thread in [arch], we've already come across one
person whose fan is controlled via acpi... and had an overheat as a
result.

Secondly, is modularising them really a solution?
- You could have tracked down which one exactly is causing the
problem, and modularised that
- Or heaven above, file a bug upstream at LKML.
- If this is a real problem, then other distros would have done the
same, and you should have found their autodetection scripts before
doing this here.

this is going to annoy more people than it is going to fix problems
for, and this is unacceptable when there's other solutions available.

and... what was the bug? can't find it on the bug tracker.

James
This task depends upon

Closed by  Tobias Powalowski (tpowa)
Sunday, 22 April 2007, 13:41 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Comment by James Rayner (iphitus) - Sunday, 22 April 2007, 10:08 GMT
ok, so.... how about make this opt-out, rather than opt-in.

because having the modules not loaded by default, affects a lot of users
having the modules loaded by default, accepts, 1 known user.

so rather, at some stage in boot, have
if [ ! grep dontloadacpi /proc/cmdline ]; then
modprobe all the acpi modules
fi

so someone can add dontloadacpi to their kernel line if they don't want them. This could be included somewhere early in rc.sysinit, or even at mkinitcpio.

Either way, you're breaking an accepted default that has worked for everyone on a huge range of distro's for a long time.

James
Comment by Jacob Bang (julemand101) - Sunday, 22 April 2007, 11:06 GMT
People with ACPI problem has all the time could add noacpi or acpi=off to the kernel command line. I can't see any reason to make the kernel modularisation.
Comment by James Rayner (iphitus) - Sunday, 22 April 2007, 11:13 GMT
noacpi or acpi=off has many nasty side effects, such as loss of multiple processors in a multiproc/core system.

in this case, one of the acpi modules, I don't know which, because this bug has never been documented, and only tpowa knows about it, caused a problem which prevented boot on a particular person's system.

James
Comment by Hussam Al-Tayeb (hussam) - Sunday, 22 April 2007, 11:21 GMT
Why not modularize that particular module?
Some modules like processor, and button should not be modularized because they will work correctly for everyone.
Comment by James Rayner (iphitus) - Sunday, 22 April 2007, 11:31 GMT
i wouldnt know. I don't know what the bug was, no details were ever given.

That said, other distros modularise their acpi modules, but by default, they load them all anyway. If we're to modularise them, then we ought to do the same, and have an opt-out as suggested above.

So modularisation is ok, if done correctly, as it wasnt this time.

James
Comment by Tobias Powalowski (tpowa) - Sunday, 22 April 2007, 13:41 GMT
fixed in initscripts-0.8-7

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