Subject: 2.1.88 a5000 (etc) patches

From: Philip Blundell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 16:09:48 +0000

Hi.

These are my patches against 2.1.88 + 
Russell's pre-patch-2.1.88-19980222-1.gz.  I don't have the time at the moment 
to clean them up so this is just a straight diff of my source tree against the 
original one, warts and all.

With this kernel my A5000 gets as far as mounting the root filesystem - I 
don't currently have enough userspace binaries to try it beyond that. 

Enabling kernel IP auto-config causes a crash.  I haven't looked at that at 
all yet, though I have a suspicion we may be passing 
csum_partial_copy_from_user() a pointer that isn't actually a valid user one 
at that stage.

There is a problem in __get_free_pages that I've worked around for now.  
Basically, the code tries to set an upper limit on the order of lists that it 
will allow itself to empty in search of an allocation.  This is fine in theory 
but if you're in a situation where memory is low and all you have is one 1MB 
chunk, small allocations will end up failing altogether even though there is 
plenty of memory available.  I suspect this happens more often on the A5000
than on newer (or non ARM) machines because of the high page size.  Anyway,
for now I've just disabled that check on the basis that fragmentation is a 
lesser evil.

I added some more .init stuff but only noticed afterwards that the whole .init 
system is currently disabled.  The kernel failed to boot when I tried to turn 
it on - not sure why, yet - it may be a tool problem.

I probably ought to point out, before Russell does it for me, that this patch 
has not been sanctioned by the relevant authorities.  If you apply it you do 
so at your own risk and it will probably cause your machine to blow up and all 
your children to have eight heads.  My posting this patch should not be taken 
as any sort of implicit claim that I understand the inner mysteries of ARM 
Linux, nor that there is anything included here that Russell hasn't already 
done better.

Enjoy.

p.

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