On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 11:06 PM, Hans de Goede <hdegoede at redhat.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > I've made a good start with reviewing the new ATK0110 driver. And I must say I > like it. But, there is a big but. > > On my Asus M2N SLI Deluxe motherboard, with this driver loaded the two hwmon > IC's on this board (one superio, one smbus) get hit by both the ACPI and native > driver code. This is bad, really bad! Old news :S http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.sensors/12454 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.sensors/12359 I actually started writing the ATK driver in response to that thread. > Luckily I can fix this by: > 1) Using Jean's queued patch for adding acpi resource checks to superio drivers > from here: > http://khali.linux-fr.org/devel/linux-2.6/jdelvare-hwmon/hwmon-acpi-check-conflict.patch > > 2) Specifying: "acpi_enforce_resources=strict" on the command line > > With this, the native drivers will no longer load. As we have no idea what the > ACPI code is doing (it might be updating the readings periodically based on a > timer for all we know). To me this (causing the native drivers to no longer > load) seems to be the right solution. Agreed. Note that since the firmware thinks it owns the hardware it may access it even without a specific driver loaded (e.g. in the thread linked above I think that the native driver was interfering with the standard TZ polling.) > Back on topic, there is one big "but" here. If we change the default setting > for acpi_enforce_resources to strict, then this will cause problems for people, > and those problems will get seen as regressions. For example many asus users > will stop having functional sensors (atleast in my asus board ACPI claims the > relevant resources for accessing the sensors). Still I think we should make the > default strict, as that seems the right thing to do. As this is an option > people can always change the option as a work around if this causes too much pain. > > Making this option strict by default is the only safe way I see for ever > allowing the atk0110 driver in to the mainline kernel. Actually the use of native drivers might already be unsafe... I agree on changing acpi_enforce_resources to strict; the transition shouldn't be too painful: ACPI drivers are loaded automagically, so the existing monitoring software will "just work". Luca
