If you overclock, you are on your own. IIRC I've used 13,3 MHz for some time Defaulting to 8 MHz and offering an option to set another clock speed (like idebus=) should be OK. --
On Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:38:09 +0100 That would not be overclocking, rather that the hardware designer would have determined that on that specific hardware design, all peripherals are able to run at 12MHz. Also note that on some other system the hardware designer might have decided to have a slower ISA clock, to save power, fulfil some EMI Sounds like a big regression to have to start using a command line option, when the current state of affairs is "it just works". /Christer --
The formalization of the ISA bus which was part of the EISA specification settled on 8.33 MHz maximum nominal frequency. There were, however, some earlier designs which used up to 12 MHz nominal; I'm not sure if that applied to 386s though. -hpa --
I've used up to 13,3 MHz on my 386DX40, but it was way out of spec and I had to use a lower PIO mode to compensate. IIRC, one of my cards forced me to settle for 10 MHz. Wikipedia claims there were systems having 16 MHz ISA bus, and systems underclocking themselves when accessing ISA. I remember having optional and mandatory waitstates, too, but I'm not 100 % sure it was on ISA. I think they were ... But overclocking is not the problem for udelay, it would err to the safe side. The problem would be a BUS having < 8 MHz, and since the days of 80286, they are hard to find. IMO having an option to set the bus speed for those systems should be enough. -- knghtbrd:<JHM> AIX - the Unix from the universe where Spock has a beard. --
If you get it wrong you risk data corruption. Not good, not clever, not appropriate. Basically the use of port 0x80 is the right thing to do for ISA devices and as 15 odd years of use has shown works reliably and solidly for ISA systems. Alan --
As long as there is no port 80 card or a similar device using it. If there is a port 80 card, ISA acess needing the delay does break, cause the data corruption you fear and does cause this thread to be started. Pest, Cholera ... OTOH, maybe the 6-MHz-delay is the same as the 8-MHz-delay, and the kernel parameter is not needed. -- Fun things to slip into your budget A Romulan Cloaking device: The PHB won't know what it is but will be to chicken to ask --
Such cards are very unusual on ISA machines and it hasn't been a problem in fifteen years. All the alternatives are vastly higher risk --
There might have been a few 386/20's clocking the ISA bus at ÷3 (6.67 MHz) rather than ÷2 (10 MHz) or ÷2.5 (8 MHz). -hpa --
Yes, and the remaining users should set the kernel option. Both of them. The question is: How will they be told about the new kernel option? --=20 A man inserted an advertisement in the classified: Wife Wanted." The next day he received a hundred letters. They all said the same thing: "You can have mine."
What exactly are you guys still talking about? Alan is looking at drivers and finds that in them outb_p is generally correct and correctly specified in bus-clocks for at least some (8390 was quoted). In those legacy drivers, the _p ops can simply stay and can use the 15-year old proven 0x80 outb. (with molnar suggesting they be renamed isa_in/outb_p and me suggesting that if someone would be doing _that_ they might as well split them manually in outb(); slow_down_io() possibly renaming slow_down_io() to isa_io_delay() or similar). Is this only about the ones then left for things like legacy PIC and PIT? Does anyone care about just sticking in a udelay(2) (or 1) there as a replacement and call it a day? Rene. --
PIT is problematic because the PIT may be necessary for udelay setup. -hpa --
The PIT usage for calibrating the delay loop can be moderated, if need by, by using the PC BIOS which by definition uses the PIT correctly it its int 15 function 83 call.. Just do it before coming up in a state where the PC BIOS int 15h calls no longer work. I gave code to do this in a much earlier message. This is the MOST reliable way to use the PIT early in boot, on a PC compatible. God knows how one should do it on a Macintosh running a 386/20 :-). But the ONLY old bat-PIT machines are, thank god, PC compatible, maybe. --
And as I've said before we don't know if we have a PC BIOS. If we are running from a kexec or on a Macintoy with EFI or an Xbox we may not. As per previous discussions for the PIT we can simply guess a safe initial udelay value and then tune the real one. Alan --
Yes, can initialise loops_per_jiffy conservatively. Just didn't quite get why you guys are talking about an ISA bus speed parameter. Rene. Rene. --
If the ISA bus is below 8 MHz, we might need a longer delay. If we default to the longer delay, the delay will be too long for more than 99,99 % of all systems, not counting i586+. Especially if the driver is fine-tuned to give maximum throughput, this may be bad. OTOH, the DOS drivers I heared about use delays and would break on underclocked ISA busses if the n * ISA_HZ delay was needed. Maybe somebody having a configurable ISA bus speed and some problematic chips can test it ... -- Fun things to slip into your budget "I [Meow Cat] sliped in 'Legal fees for firing Jim (Jim's my [his] boss).' Jim approved the budget and was fired when upper management saw the budget." --
I've been looking at DOS reference drivers - they almost all use I/O port based delays. --
Yes, and I repeat -- old legacy ISA drivers can stay as they are. They've been doing what they've been doing for 15 years and given that the systems that break don't use them there is no practical upside to changing them and a big downside particularly with respect to difficulty of testing. A somewhat overly long delay shouldn't be particularly problematic for the few remaining legacy hardware users _outside_ drivers/ Rene. --
The last time I heard of a 12 MHz bus in a PC system was in the days of the PC-AT, when some clone makers sped up their buses (pre PCI!!!) in an attempt to allow adapter card *memory* to run at the 12 MHz speed. This caused so many industry-wide problems with adapter cards that couldn't be installed in certain machines and still run reliably that the industry learned a lesson. That doesn't mean that LPCs don't run at 12 MHz, but if they do, they don't have old 8 bit punky cards plugged into them for lots of practical reasons. (I have whole drawers full of such old cards, trying to figure out an environmentally responsible way to get rid of them - even third world countries would be fools to make machiens with them). I can't believe that we are not supporting today's machines correctly because we are still trying to be compatible with a few (at most a hundre thousand were manufactured! Much less still functioning or running Linux) machines. Now I understand that PC/104 machines and other things are very non PC compatible, but are x86 processor architectures. Do they even run x86 under 2.6.24? Perhaps the rational solution here is to declare x86 the architecture for "relics" and develop a merged architecture called "modern machines" to include only those PCs that have been made to work since, say, the release of (cough) WIndows 2000? --
It wasn't about clone makers speeding up their busses. The ISA bus originally ran at the CPU clock - 4.77/8/6/10 .. etc. Quite a few board makers assumed 8MHz and while faster isn't a big problem at 8bit trying to do the 8/16 bit decode with logic chips at 8MHz is quite tight and above that generally broke. 8bit tends to work fine because you've got a It is about supporting this properly. Properly for ISA devices means Linux runs on x86, it isn't limited to PC type architectures at all. We No point. We've got the 64bit kernel for that. That is a much saner boundary to throw out all the nutty stuff. Alan --
On another topic. I have indeed determined what device uses port 80 on Quanta AMD64 laptops from HP. I had lunch with Jim Gettys of OLPC a week ago; he's an old friend since he worked on the original X windows system. After telling him my story about port 80, he mentioned that the OLPC XO machine had some issues with port 80 which was by design handled by the ENE KBC device on its motherboard. He said the ENE was a very desirable chipset for AMD designs recommended by Quanta. Richard Smith of OLPC explained to me how the KB3700 they use works, and that they use the KB3700 to send POST codes out over a serial link during boot up. This gave me a reason to take apart my laptop, to discover that it has an ENE KB3920 B0 as its EC and KBC. The port interface for the KB3920 includes listening to port 80 which is then made available to firmware on the EC. It is recognized and decoded on the LPC bus, only for writes, and optionally can generate an interrupt in the 8051. Dumping both the ENE chip, and looking at the DSDT.dsl for my machine, I discovered that port 80 is used as an additional parameter for various DSDT methods that communicate to the EC, when it is operating in ACPI mode. More work is in progress as I play around with this. But the key thing is that ACPI and perhaps SMM both use port 80 as part of the base function of the chipset. And actually, if I had looked at the /sys/bus/pnp definitions, rather than /proc/ioports, I would have noticed that port 80 was part of a PNP0C02 resource set. That means exactly one thing: ACPI says that port 80 is NOT free to be used, for delays or anything else. This should make no difference here: it's just one more reason to stop using port 80 for delays on modern machines. --
And shoot the designer of this particular microcontroller firmware. -hpa --
Well, some days I want to shoot the "designer" of the entire Wintel architecture... it's not exactly "designed" by anybody of course, and today it's created largely by a collection of Taiwanese and Chinese ODM firms, coupled with Microsoft WinHEC and Intel folks. At least they follow the rules and their ACPI and BIOS code say that they are using port 80 very clearly if you use PnP and ACPI properly. And in the old days, you were "supposed" to use the system BIOS to talk to things like the PIT that had timing issues, not write your own code. Or perhaps the ACPI spec should specify a timing loop spec and precisely specify the desired timing after accessing an I/O port till that device has properly "acted" on that operation. The idea that Port 80 was "unused" and appropriate for delay purposes elicited skepticism by Linus that is recorded for posterity in the comments of the relevant Linux include files - especially since it was clearly "used" for non-delay purposes, by cards that could be plugged into a PCI (fast), not just an 8-bit ISA, bus. Perhaps we should declare the world of ACPI systems a separate "arch" from the world of l'ancien regime where folklore about which ports were used for what ruled. I lived through those old days, and they were not wonderful, either. The world sucks, and Linux is supposed to be able to adapt to that world, suckitude and all. --
Does anyone know what port does Windows use? I'm pretty sure that it isn't 80h as I run Windows 98 often with port 80h debug card inserted. The last POST code set by BIOS usually remains on the display and only changes when BIOS does something like suspend/resume. IIRC, there was a program that was able to display temperature from onboard sensors on the port 80h display that's integrated on some mainboards. -- Ondrej Zary --
Windows these days does delays with timing loops or the scheduler. It doesn't use a "port". Also, Windows XP only supports machines that tend not to have timing problems that use delays. Instead, if a device takes a while to respond, it has a "busy bit" in some port or memory slot that can be tested. Almost all of the issues in Linux where _p operations are used are (or should be) historical - IMO. --
Windows XP can run on a machine with ISA slot(s) and has built-in drivers for some plug&play ISA cards - e.g. the famous 3Com EtherLink III. I think that -- Ondrej Zary --
The NE2K-driver went missing in W2K. BTDT. -- Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt. -- Fred Weasley --
Haven't tried personally but it seems to work accroding to this http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/wxpne2k.html - and it can be made to work even with non-PnP cards. -- Ondrej Zary --
There is no need to use io writes to supposedly/theoretically "unused ports" to make drivers work on any bus. ISA included! You can, for example, wait for an ISA bus serial adapter to put out its next character by looping reading the port that has the output buffer full flag in a tight loop, with no delay code at all. And if you need to time things, just call a timing loop subroutine that you calibrate at boot time. I wrote DOS drivers for NE2000's on the ISA bus when they were brand new designs from Novell without such kludges as writes to I/O port 80. I don't remember writing a driver for the 3com devices - probably didn't, because 3Com's cards were expensive at the time. In any case, Linux *did* adopt this port 80 strategy - I'm sure all concerned thought it was frightfully clever at the time. Linus expressed his skepticism in the comments in io.h. The problem is to safely move away from it toward a proper strategy that doesn't depend on "bus aborts" which would trigger machine checks if they were properly enabled. --
On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:44:54 -0500 Now you're totally confusing things. You're talking about looking at bits in a register to see if a transmit register is empty. That's easy. The delays needed for the Intel M8259 and M8253 say that you're not even allowed to access the registers _at_ _all_ for some time after a register access. If you do a write to a register immediately followed by any access, including a read of the status register, you can corrupt the state of the chip. And the Intel chips are not the only ones with that kind of brain damage. But what makes the 8259 and 8253 a big problem is that every modern PC has a descendant of those chips in them. The discrete Intel chips or clones got aggregated into Super I/O chips, and the Super I/O chips were put on a LPC bus (an ISA bus with another name) or integrated into the southbrige. And the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" mantra probably means that some modern chipsets are still using exactly the same internal design as the 25 year old chips and will still be subject to some of those ancient limitations. /Christer --
Not true. Even on the original IBM 5150 PC, the 8259 on the motherboard accepted back to back OUT and IN instructions, and it would NOT trash the chip state. You can read the original IBM BIOS code if you like. I don't remember about the 8253's timing. I doubt the chip's state would be corrupted in any way. The data and address lines were the same data and address lines that the microprocessor used to access memory - it Register compatible. Not the same chips or even the same masks or Don't try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs: I've been programming PC compatibles since probably before you were able to do long division - including writing code on the first prototype IBM PCs, the first pre-manufacturing PC-ATs, and zillions of clones. (and I was also involved in designing hardware including the so-called "Lotus Intel" expanded memory cards and the original PC cards) The 8259 PIC is an *interrupt controller*. It was NEVER present in a Super I/O chip, or an LPC chip. Its functionality was absorbed into the chipsets that control Oh, come on. Give the VLSI designers some credit for brains. The CAD tools used to design the 8259 and 8253 were so primitive you couldn't even get a chip manufactured with designs from that era today. When people design chips today they do it with simulators that can't even work, and testers that run from test suites that were not available at the time. --
On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:28:03 -0500 No, but somehow people keep making similar mistakes. The DEC HiNote needed outb_p to function correctly? That was definitely a much more modern design than the original PC and most probably did not use any discrete Intel chips, but the same timing problems were there. I belive Argument by personal authority. Thats good. I guess that's why you don't seem to understand the difference between reading the serial port status register and not being allowed to access a register at all due to such this as the 4 cycle delay you quoted yourself from the 8390 data sheet, and similar issues with the I8253 that I quoted from its Yup, sorry about that, it got integrated into some other chip instead. I was thinking of another timer, the RTC which is usually a part of the Super I/O. And which is yet another troublesome area since apparently a lot of chipsets have problems with it. But the sequence is the same, discrete chips get aggregated into larger chips. Sometimes the sometimes old macrocells are reused, sometimes they are redesigned from And they still keep making the same mistakes... Registers that require wait states before being read again, register that assume that there are going to be some spare cycles between each access so that some internal logic has time to update, registers that would have needed a one byte FIFO to avoid DMA overruns (I'd almost forgotten about that specific bug on SPI controller of the Samsung 2410, but it bit me last week and I only managed to chase it down properly yesterday), and so on. I'm quite impressed with what some VLSI designers manage to do. I just saw a company roll out a completely new ARM9 design with lots of fun stuff and as far as I know they only made one single mistake on that chip. On the other hand, on other designs you can see how the same old macrocell has been reused long past the "best before" date, because some bugs crop up over and over again. /Christer --
There is no other kind of argument. Are you claiming supernatural authority drives your typing fingers, or is your argument based on what you think you know? I have piles of code that I wrote, spec sheets (now that I'm back in my home office), code that others wrote at the time, and documentation from vendors that come from my personal experiences. That doesn't mean I'm always right - always happy to learn something new. Just don't condescend to a 55 year old who has been writing operating systems, compilers, and designing hardware for almost 40 years professionally (yes, I got my first job at 16 writing FORTRAN code to If you read what I said carefully, I said that the 8390 was a very special case. The "chip select" problem it experienced was pretty much unique among boards of the time. Those of us who looked at its design and had any experience designing hardware for buses like the unibus or even the buses on PDP-8's and DG machines thought it had to be a joke. Of course it saved money per board, so it beat the 3Com boards on price - and you could program it after a fashion. So it involved "cheaping out". The normal timing problem was that an out or in operation to a board or chip required some time to elapse before the chip performed the side effects internally so that the next operation to it would have an effect. This is exactly the reason why most chips and boards are designed to either have a polling of a flag indicate operation completion. The serial "buffer empty" flag is the simplest possible explanatory example of such handshaking that came to mind (writing a character to a serial output device twice often leads to surprises, unless you wait for the previous character to clock out). See my The 8253 was a motherboard chip. I am not sure it had any timing problems with its electrical signalling. I just don't remember. The The RTC has very well documented timing requirements. But none of the spec sheets, nor my experience with it, me...
3C503 needs delays for some setups according to the docs. I can't tell you how the 3COM drivers did it as that was a different bit of 3com to the bit I worked for. From the rest of 3Com I saw probably utterly vilely ;) Later 3Com stuff was either sane (3c509 etc) or used whacko intel chips (3c507/27) which had their own special breed of insanity to replace No. The problem is that certain people, unfortunately those who know nothing about ISA related bus systems, keep trying to confuse ISA delay logic with core chip logic and end up trying to solve both a problem and a non-problem in one, creating a nasty mess in the process. Alan --
As well you should. I am honestly curious (for my own satisfaction) as to what the natsemi docs say the delay code should do (can't imagine they say "use io port 80 because it is unused"). I don't have any copies anymore. But mere curiosity on my part is not worth spending a lot of time on - I know you are super busy. If there's a copy online I agree that the problems of chip logic and ISA delay are all tangled up, probably more than need be. I hope that the solution turns out to simplify matters, and hopefully to document the intention of the resulting code sections a bit more clearly for the future. --
What is the outcome of this thread? Are we going to use timing based port delays, or can we finally drop these things entirely on 64-bit architectures? I a have a doubly vested interest in this, both as the owner of an affected HP dv9210us laptop and as a maintainer of paravirt code - and would like 64-bit Linux code to stop using I/O to port 0x80 in both cases (as I suspect would every other person involved with virtualization). BTW, it isn't ever safe to pass port 0x80 through to hardware from a virtual machine; some OSes use port 0x80 as a hardware available scratch register (I believe Darwin/x86 did/does this during boot). This means simultaneous execution of two virtual machines can interleave port 0x80 values or share data with a hardware provided covert channel. This means KVM should be trapping port 0x80 access, which is really expensive, or alternatively, Linux should not be using port 0x80 for timing bus access on modern (64-bit) hardware. I've tried to follow this thread, but with all the jabs, 1-ups, and obscure legacy hardware pageantry going on, it isn't clear what we're really doing. Thanks, Zach --
On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:52:42 -0800 I belive Alan Cox is doing a review of some drivers, to see if they actually need the I/O port delay. A lot of drivers probably use outb_p just because it was copy-pasted from some other driver and it can be removed. Alan's review has also brought to light a lack of locking in some drivers, so I think Alan has been adding proper locking to some of the watchdog drivers. Most old ISA only device drivers can keep using OUT 80h. They are not used on modern machines and it's better to keep them unchanged to avoid unneccesary incompatibilities. As far as I know, the 8253 PIT timer code needs outb_p on some older platform, and this is one of the most troublesome since the same PIT controller (or a register compatible one) has been used since the original IBM PC, and it is frequently executed code. Ingo Molnar has done an alternate implementation of the PIT clock source which uses udelay instead of OUT 80h to delay accesses to the ports. The kernel could make a choice of which variant to use based on the DMI year, if compiling for x86_64, or something similar. Maybe have a command line option too. The keyboard controller on some platform needs the delay, and the same driver is used on both ancient and modern systems, I think it can be changed to udelay since it's not so time critical code. The 8259 interrupt controller on some platform needs the delay, I think it can be changed to udelay since it's only some setup code that uses outb_p. I guess there are time critical accesses to the interrupt controller from assembly code somewhere to acknowledge interrupts, and that code needs a review. The floppy controller code uses outb_p. Even though there might be floppy controllers on modern systems, I'd rather leave the floppy code alone since it's supposed to be very fragile. If you still use floppies you deserve what you get. Some specific drivers, such as drivers for 8390 or 8390 clone based network cards are also a bit troublesome, they ...
Yes, Alan should be considered to be in the driver seat here (and current Just udelay() should be fine after "fixing" udelay() to be somewhat usefully I'd not expect very time crtical. The current outb_p use gives a delay somewhere between .5 and 2 microseconds as per earlier survey meaning a udelay(1) or 2 would be enough -- again, at the point that udelay() is sensible. Floppies forever. In practice, leaving it alone isn't going to matter, but in that same practice changing it to udelay() probably doesn't either. The ones to leave alone are the ones that are clumsy/impossible to test and the ... or simply deleted. The current outb_p is "outb; slow_down_io" as a macro so that with this you also get no binary changes, making it rather easy to prove that things do not change timing in cases where you keep the delay. Based on specific DMI strings this can be limited to tested machines (as in ... destroying DX while it's at it meaning this might (will) also need DX reloads. Not an argument versus a function call, but an argument versus the Not so much it seems. Only that the only reason for the outb_p slit is an API one. Molnar wants the API cleaned up to make sure no new users of outb_p creep in, and being explkicit abhout what it that you're doing is going to take care of that. If simple outb_p() deprecation is considered enough instead, no need to touch anything in drivers/, only changes to "outb(); udelay()" outside drivers/. I'd let Alan decide here. Thanks for the roundup. Rene. --
I'm speaking specifically in terms of 64-bit platforms here. Shouldn't we unconditionally drop outb_p doing extra port I/O on 64-bit architectures? Especially considering they don't even have an ISA bus Agree. Zach --
I don't think the latter statement was true - AFAIR there are Alphas
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
--See subject line. -hpa --
Why should the bitsize of the CPU matter for this? It seems one of the less meaningful keys for this. Second, as I have mentioned, I don't believe this is really the case, especially not for the PIT, which is still present -- the PIT *semantics* has explicit timing constraints. Third, you still have ISA devices, they're just called LPC or PC104 devices these days. -hpa --
On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:18:11 -0800 Or PCMCIA. I'm still a happy user of a Zyxel ZyAIR 100B, it's one of the most stable cards Wifi I've got running under Linux. :-) /Christer --
Yes, but you hardly want a situation where the machine works booting a 32-bit kernel and not a 64-bit kernel, or vice versa. Furthermore, it's not so much about "modern" versus "old", it is about picking a certain set of bugs. -hpa --
Nothing that seems *crucial* going forward for Linux. The fate of "legacy machines" is really important to get right. I have a small suggestion in mind that might be helpful in the future: the "motherboard resources" discovered as PNP0C02 devices in their _CRS settings in ACPI during ACPI PnP startup should be reserved (or checked), and any drivers that still use port 80 implicitly should reserve that port. This may be too late in the boot process to make a decision not to use port 80, and it doesn't help decide a strategy to use an alternate port (0xED happens to "work" on the dv9000 machines in the sense that it generates a bus timeout on LPC, but there is no guarantee that 0xED is free on any particular motherboard, and "unusedness" is not declared in any BIOS/ACPI tables) or to use a udelay-based iodelay (but there is nothing in the BIOS tables that suggest the right delays for various I/O ports if any modern parts need them...which I question, but can't prove a negative in general). However, doing the reservations on such resources could generate a warning that would help diagnose new current and future designs including devices like the ENE KB3920 that have a port that is defaulted to port 80 and routed to the EC for functions that the firmware and ACPI can agree to do. Or any other ports used in new ways and properly notified to the OS via the now-standard Wintel BIOS functions. I don't know if /proc/ioports is being maintained, but the fact that it doesn't contain all of those PNP0C02 resources known on my machine seems to be a bug - which I am happy to code a patch or two for as a contribution back to Linux, if it isn't on the way out as the /sys hierarchy does a better job. /sys/bus/pnp/... does get built properly and has port 80 described properly - not as a DMA port, but as a port in use by device 05:00, which is the motherboard resource catchall. Thus the patch would be small. --
That's funny, because there is definitely no guarantee that you get back what you read (well, perhaps there is on Apple.) -hpa --
According to Phoenix Technologies book "System BIOS for IBM PCs, Compatibles and EISA Computers, 2nd Edition", the I/O port list gives port 0080h R/W Extra page register (temporary storage) Despite looking, I've never seen it documented anywhere else, but I believe it works on just about every PC platform. Except, apparently, my laptop. Zach --
The port 80 problem was discovered by me, after months of "bisecting" the running code around a problem with hanging when using hwclock in 64-bit mode when ACPI is on. So it kills my laptop, too, and many currentlaptop motherboards designed by Quanta for HP and Compaq (dv6000, dv9000, tx1000, apparently) In the last couple of weeks, I was able with luck to discover that the problem is the ENE KB3920 chip, which is the "big brother" of the KB3700 chip included in the OLPC XO "$100 laptop" made also by Quanta. I verified this by taking my laptop apart - a fun and risky experience. Didn't break any connectors, but I don't recommend it for those who are not experienced disassembling laptops and cellphones, etc. The KB3920 contains an EC, an SMBus, a KBC, some watchdog timers, and a variety of other functions that keep the laptop going, coordinating the relationships among various peripherals. The firmware is part standard from ENE, part OEM-specific, in this case coded by Quanta or a BIOS subcontractor. You can read the specsheet for the KB3700 online at laptop.org, since the specs of the laptop are "open". The 3920's spec is confidential. And the firmware is confidential as well for both the 3700 and 3920. Clues as to what it does can be gleaned by reading the disassembler output of the DSDT code in the particular laptops - though the SMM BIOS probably also talks to it. Modern machines have many subsystems, and the ACPI and SMBIOS coordinate to run them; blade servers also have drawer controllers and backplane management buses. The part that runs Linux is only part of the machine. Your laptop isn't an aberration. It's part of the new generation of evolved machines that take advantage of the capabilities of ACPI and SMBIOS and DMI standards that are becoming core parts of the market. --
Thanks very much for that - I was debugging this for a while too, and I beg to differ. I managed to turn the thing into a brick by upgrading the BIOS (with the correct image, no less) in an attempt to fix it. I just got it back from repair. I'm not sure that is positive evolutionary development, but it certainly does make my laptop an aberration :) FWIW, I fixed the problem locally by recompiling, changing port 80 to port 84 in io.h; works great, and doesn't conflict with any occupied ports. Zach --
Might not give you a "proper" delay though. 0xed should be a better choice... Rene. --
Not entirely unusable. You can recover silently from the machine check if it was one of the known accesses to the 'unused port'. It certainly achieves a delay :) On ppc32 we recover from the machine check if it was any inb/outb -- mostly to work around crappy drivers developed on i386, I believe. -- dwmw2 --
I'm sure that's what the driver writers had in mind. ;-) And I think we probably have a great shot at getting Intel, Microsoft, HP, et al.. to add a feature for Linux to one of the ACPI table specifications that define an "unused port for delay purposes" field in the ACPI 4.0 spec, and retrofit it into PC/104 machine BIOSes. At least Microsoft doesn't have a patent on using port 80 for delay purposes. :-) --
This use of port 80 (or insert some other random number) is a croc of hackery of the most inexperienced kind. The task to be performed is to delay for some period, and I think it's a mix of bloody mindedness and fear of unfamiliar code and specification that explains why a delay is not being coded. Lest we forget, someone who should know better said that an OUT is used because you don't know how long the delay should be on any specific machine. What rubbish. For what it's worth, I would oppose any attempt to ammend ACPI specifications in the way described above. It's bad enough to have that embarrassing and unseemly hack in Linux. It would be so much worse to enshrine the practice as industry standard practice. I won't even mention the many instances of these delays where no delay is what properly is needed. Performance? Who cares about performance? --
On Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:06:24 +1030 Wrong. It's a careful designed solution used by all sorts of code for over 15 years. The task to be performed is to delay for some period Wrong, it is for some number of bus clocks which is why I/O cycles are Correctness, who needs correctness ? Alan --
It's not careful: it's a croc. It's an ugly hack, an abuse of process, Wrong. It's a delay. It's a delay measured in I/O cycles, but still a delay. Doing I/O to get a delay, even if the delay is intended to be measured in I/O cycles, is hackery of the most inexperienced sort. It's the sort of thing junior programmers get boxed in the ear for. There's no satisfactory reason to do it that way. If the hardware required an intermediate junk I/O, that would be a reason to do one, but it doesn't, does it? It requires a delay. It's Wrong again. Of course one knows how long the delay should be. The bus speed is known. The specifications of the hardware is known. Do the math you (the programmer writing the driver, not Alan) lazy sluggard, and use a delay. It baffles commonsense to say you don't know how long Well, frankly, the development process could stand a little more of it. The sooner we stop denying that this is a hack, the sooner we can fix it. --
And the only instruction that is synchronized to the bus in question is Wrong again. ISA bus speed is neither defined precisely, nor visible in a system portable fashion. I'm so glad you have nothing better to do than troll, if you actually wrote code I'd be worried it might get into something people used. Alan --
This is a timing issue, isn't it? How are we synchronising, other than by delaying for a (bus-dependant) period? The characteristics of each bus are known so a number can be assigned for "one bus cycle", without You say, "system portable," but I think you mean, "automatically determined." We don't have to define this value automatically, if I'm not trolling. You know this is true because many people perceive this to be a problem. I'm working on fixing it. Not all Linux problems are solvable by diving into code, and there is anecdotal evidence to believe this one has big performance considerations. I don't understand Speaking of writing code: I remember working on a bluetooth Oops. Lacking the hardware, I went to you for advice on how to get it before someone for testing. You never replied. -