On Sun, 2014-06-08 at 20:02 -0400, Dave Jones wrote: > On Mon, Jun 09, 2014 at 12:20:42AM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > longhaul quickly caused hard lockups and possibly killed the memory > > module on my EPIA-PD board. It is commented as: > > > > 'BIG FAT DISCLAIMER: Work in progress code. Possibly *dangerous*' > > that last part may have been overly dramatic. When I was originally > writing this driver I was using pre-production cpu's which were > marginal to begin with. Production hw should have been more tolerant. > What didn't help was a lot of the EPIAs were made with *Really* > shitty capacitors that would pop open and ooze over the boards. Might want > to eyeball those, you can usually tell when they've gone bad. I threw the board out last year, but didn't notice any such damage. The failure occurred *immediately* after I loaded the driver (when auto-loading was enabled), while the board had been stable for several years up to that point. And the board started working again after I replaced the memory module and prevented the driver from loading. Of course, it *could* just be coincidence that the memory went bad then. I didn't feel like testing that! Activation of the driver is now guarded by a module parameter, so even with auto-loading enabled it doesn't do any damage by default. Ben. > > Let's put another warning where people are more likely to see it. > > That said, I'm not against itbeing marked BROKEN (I thought it > already was), and certainly don't recommend distros enabling it. > > I'd also not stand in the way of someone throwing it out completely > given the small amount of systems out there likely still running this. > > Dave > -- Ben Hutchings One of the nice things about standards is that there are so many of them.
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