Neo Freerunner PMU Status

[Andy Green]

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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> On Fri, Feb 08, 2008 at 11:36:38AM +0000, Andy Green wrote:
> 
>> Ha -- looks like the PCF50633 "LOWBAT" interrupt service tries always to
>> do kill_proc(1, SIGPWR, 1); when LOWBAT really means *NO*BAT -- it kills
>> the garbage collection fork stone dead when it tries to start instead
>> and finds that signal waiting there.  I guess the GTA01 PMU driver did
>> the same...
> 
> Yes.  This is the desired behaviour.  Traditionally, unix power failures
> are signalled to the init process by means of SIGPWR.  Even 20-30 year
> old code can deal with that :)

It's really the desired behaviour that if we don't have a battery in
this device it tries to kill init?  I don't think I desire it -- I want
the device to stay up without a battery so long as I give it power
another way (patches coming).

> Now the question is rather: why is that garbage collection thread using
> PID 1.  It shouldn't do that, since that PID is reserved for init and
> nothing else.
> 
> It's probably worth pushing this question to linux-mtd and/or dwmw2
> directly.

This issue belongs to nobody less than Linus I think -- I saw he wrote
the fork.c code that associates the signal with the kernel thread for
the garbage collection.  I think the issue is more correctly that the
process does not appear in the process table yet at the time it blows
chunks, therefore I guess it doesn't have ANY process ID.  Somehow it is
affected by pending signals to nonexistant pids.

- -Andy
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