Re: a little sysadmin story

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Re: writing directly to the serial port, Is there another layer that the kernel provides that we could go through to avoid that issue entirely? How do other devices work, or is there not any other such modules in the kernel that do use the serial port like speakup does for synths?
On 10/9/2014 12:08 PM, John G. Heim wrote:
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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--
Take care,
Ty
http://tds-solutions.net
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.

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