spca5xx freezes system

[Lonni J Friedman]

On 4/18/06, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
> | From: Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com>
>
> | I agree that this could still point to a driver bug.  I asked the
> | developer whether he had verified if his driver works with the
> | 'official' gnu gcc-4.1, and he stated that he had not.
>
> Did you ask this on the spca50x-devs list?  That is probably the best

I couldn't even find such a list on the spca5xx website.  If you've
got a pointer, I'll gladly take the discussion there.

> place to discuss this.  It should be better than private mail to the
> developer because other users can join in.  It should be better than
> mail to this list since it is more appropriately specialized.  But it
> would great to tell us how this works out.
>
> A quick look at that list shows a certain amount of bad behaviour on
> the part of this driver.
>
> Archive:
>   http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=spca50x-devs
>
> Scary thread:
>   http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=9976551&forum_id=32
>
> One FC5 thread (there are others):
>   http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10186347&forum_id=32
>
> |  I will be
> | unlikely to have time in the near future (within the next few weeks at
> | least) to rebuild a kernel against gcc-3.2 to verify his claim.  So,
> | if someone else has the time, please let us know how it works out.
>
> I don't think that it make sense to use GCC-3.2.  Red Hat did their QA
> using 4.x and other parts of the Fedora kernel may break with 3.2.

I wouldn't be building a Fedora kernel, I'd be building a kernel.org
kernel, which most definitely is qualified against gcc versions
earlier than 4.x.  But I do see your point.

>
> It makes more sense to use GCC4.x without -O.  But just for the
> driver.  Surely you can build the driver without building the kernel.

Well sure, but since the spca5xx developer said that he thought
gcc-4.x was the problem, I figured it would be a better use of my time
to not spend time on gcc-4.x, and isolate whether the version of gcc
that the spca5xx dev claims is 'good' truly is.

>
> I must admit that the following message disturbs me.  Building a
> driver should not require write access to the kernel source tree.
>   tom1:/usr/src/spca5xx-20060301# make
>    Building SPCA5XX driver for 2.5/2.6 kernel.
>    Remember: you must have read/write access to your kernel source tree.
> This was extracted from
>   http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10001199&forum_id=32

Yea, that bugged me too.  Overall, i'm not at all impressed with
spca5xx or its management.


--
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       http://netllama.linux-sxs.org