On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Dave Airlie airlied@redhat.com wrote:
On Wed, 2010-09-29 at 17:47 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
The i810 and i830 drivers are the only hardware drivers that still use the BKL without anyone volunteering to fix them.
The problem is the userspace interface is badly designed and ABI, so fixing these without the hw is messy, we know people have the hardware because it breaks they still give out, we don't know anyone who cares enough to fix it at this point in time.
The hardware is rather old and typically used on non-SMP systems. Mark them as BROKEN_ON_SMP and remove the BKL now so that people can still use the driver once the BKL is entirely gone.
You cannot get an SMP system with i810 or i830 support hardware in it, however no distro ships UP kernels anymore they all ship SMP kernels that hotplug/patch the second CPU. So the thing is although technically these drivers are broken on SMP, they won't ever get run in SMP mode on a combined UP/SMP kernel, and I'm not really sure BROKEN_ON_SMP takes care of this.
Okay so you can get a hyper-threaded 845 I've been informed, suck. But anyways anyone using those GPUs is most likely running the i915 driver. i810 is the only one I really care about as it has no equiv.
Dave.