Re: linux-next: Tree for July 30

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:17:31 -0400 Dmitry Torokhov [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 10:44:37AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

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On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:56:48 -0400 Dmitry Torokhov [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 05:36:16PM +0200, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:

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On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Dmitry Torokhov
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 11:10:29PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

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On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:06:35 +1000 Stephen Rothwell [off-list ref] wrote:

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I have created today's linux-next tree at
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sfr/linux-next.git

The X server broke on my FC8 t61p thinkpad.  Mainline is OK.

Various information is at http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/mo/

I'm suspecting the input layer - my synaptics device seems to have
disappeared?  See http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/mo/Xorg-log-diff.txt

I think this patch should help with Synaptics:

Which unfortunately doesn't help all people running with older synaptics
user-space after commit 0571c5d20aca71c735222132b02aebddf593045c
("Input: expand keycode space").

Can't this be solved without breaking Xorg on newer kernels running
older synaptics?

No. The X driver is broken. It tells kernel to use buffer bugger than
allocated and gets its stack smashed. Tslib has also soma funkiness
in the ioctl handling as well... *shrug*

We have a couple months to get distros updated...

aaarrrrgggggghhh.  I don't think this is practical.  This means that
(for example) FC5 machines (of which I happen to have one) are dead. 
And lots of other older-distro-based systems.

Is there some userspace workaround which doesn't require an X server
update?

Surely it must be possible to make the kernel contiue to support these
servers?

Andrew,

It is not like we broke ABI here. The progam (synaptics driver) had a
grave bug. Older kernels happened to paper over the bug because they
did not fill the whole buffer that was advertised as available. Now
that we have more data to report the bug bit us. What do you want me
to do?

Paper over the bug again.  When it happens, spit out a loud printk.

Synaptics driver is a small package and takes 2 minutes to recompile.
You don't have to update entire X server with it (in fact I don't think
it is even part of X distribution because it is GPL).

What proportion of the X servers out there did we just break?

Was the crash I saw due to this?

Where would I (Aunt Tillie running FC5) go to find out how to fix my
machine up again?