Hmmm... I don't know. I have to say that I remain unconvinced. I've
never seen speakup cause a kernel panic. On the other hand, I have
witnessed the false cause effect. Something happens that causes a kernel
panic and since speakup is part of the kernel, it naturally has
problems. You were on a development server, right? Isn't it more likely
that one of the developers crashed the server amd that, in turn, caused
problems for speakup? I run some development servers here at the UW math
department and it happens all the time. Somebody causes an OOM (out of
memory) event and, yes, that crashes speakup.
I once asked on the kernel developers list for comments on what's wrong
with the speakup code. There is that one biggie, of course, speakup
writes directly to the serial port. But all the other criticisms were
things like not following naming conventions, poor indentation, etc.
Maybe the people who mattered didn't bother to answer my question. But
there wasn't anything in there that would tend to indicate that speakup
is prone to causing kernel panics. Now, any software package can have a
bug. But I have no reason to believe that speakup is particularly
unstable. Quite the contrary in fact.
And even if there is a bug in speakup that can cause a kernel panic,
that's an argument for finding the bug and fixing it. Not for abandoning
it entirely.
On 10/09/14 08:34, Deedra Waters wrote:
Janina,
speakup was the cause because when bossman came down to hook up a
monitor and look, the panick messages had something to do with speakup.
As for backing up their work, they were trying to fix their fuck-up to
begin with. The initial problem wasn't with speakup. However when i was
helping them debug it, speakup made the kernel panick and crash.
Debian i dont think likes people with root access on their box to begin
with, but i think they kind of didn't like speakup in their kernel to
begin with.
I suspect on the other hand that if speakup was a user-space app, it
wouldn't have mattered to them so much. If a userspace program crashes
it doesn't take down the whole box. When speakup does though, it takes
down the whole box.
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