Dear Jon,
In message 499C58FA.20507@freescale.com you wrote:
Trent - you have obviously already spend a lot of effort into analyzing this code - most probably more time than any other of us. Based on your experience and the effort you already spent I think it would be best if you could provided a patch to fix all boards.
Just as a clarification, are you asking Trent to *fix* it for all boards, or to generate a patch that will apply to all boards?
He. Of course I can only ask to provide patch that, to the best of Trent's experience, is supposed to fix the problems. I am aware thatthere is a chance that it will not work on some boards, but then it's up to the board maintainers to complain and to help fixing this (rpobabmly small) number of remaining issues.
Specifically, I recall Trent's hesitation was he doesn't have access to most boards (not even all PPC boards), and he wasn't even sure it was a problem on some other ARCHes in the first place.
Good point. But which other options do we have?
We can:
1) apply the patch to a small subset of the boards that are known to be affected (at least all PowerPC boards)
2) apply the patch to all boards that are known to be affected (all PowerPC boards)
3) apply the patch to all boards that are most probably affected (all boards)
If we go for 1) or even 2), ther eis a pretty high chance that the problem will byte us later, and until somebody remembers that this was raised (and fixed) before in another architecture, lots of efforts will be wasted.
However, if we now apply a patch that breaks a number of boards we will quickly learn where the change works and where not.
In my point of view the risk of a potential damage involved with 3) is smaller than the probability for damage and the amount of effort cause by 2) and especially by 1).
I don;t think such a patch should go into the current release, but it's a good candidate for the "next" branch and thus for v2009.05.
But, if you are asking for an off-the-cuff patch that can be applied to all boards without testing by Trent, then I am confident he would be willing to help here.
I really hope Trent will help out.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk