new kernel ... / meaning of stable-tracking

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hey,

2008/9/29 Sean McNeil <sean at mcneil.com>:
> Mike (mwester) wrote:
>> You are unilaterally making the decision to replace existing
>> functionality with something that provides considerably lesser
>> functionality, yet you have never proven the case that the lost
>> functionality is, in fact, extraneous.
>>
>> But, hey -- it's clear your mind is made up, so we'll all just start
>> getting used to pulling the back off the device and removing the
>> battery.  This discussion, like the others involving removal of debug
>> and test code, seems to result in the same thing: if it's something the
>> core developers want, it goes in, but if it's something the user
>> community wants, they can fork the kernel and write it their way.  My
>> apologies for thinking this might be open for discussion.
>
> I find all this very counter-productive. For one thing, you are asking
> unilaterally that the code remain and don't want to discuss the options.
> It would be a lot more helpful if you could make a strong case to keep
> it in place.

I don't normally use the emergency power button thing but recently I
used it two times in two different situations so I thought I'd just
give here the use cases so they can be considered when finding a
replacement mechanism:

First was when I was booting off the sd for the first time and the sd
had errors so the kernel loaded from nand okay and then init loaded
but then subsequent programs or scripts loaded corrupt and something
locked up, so I used the power button.

Second time was when I was hacking the timers yesterday and apparently
I broke gettimeofday and one of the first processes hung waiting for
something, I used the power button (for kicks) and it worked. (99% of
the times I was just taking the battery out and wouldn't mind doing it
that time also)

Something to consider is that Linux has something called SysRq key for
like 15 years and it's a similar concept.  It's something that works
at all times even after the kernel panicked and nobody doubts its
usefulness.

On a different note does someone know if gta01 had any stronger
mechanism than what we have now?  I seem to recall that my gta01 would
*always* power down if I pressed one of the two buttons and no driver
was there to react to the button presses, i.e. something like a
hardware hang check - I may be wrong but I thought it was something
clever in the PCF50606 that would power down the whole device whenever
an interrupt remained un-ACKed for longer than 5s or so.  It worked
independently of whether the kernel finished booting or panicked.

Cheers