Hi Greg,

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 1:28 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 01:11:31PM +0200, Stefano Brivio wrote:

quoted

On Tue, 29 Aug 2017 12:59:00 +0200
Geert Uytterhoeven [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 5:03 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

The IRDA code has long been obsolete and broken.  So, to keep people
from trying to use it, and to prevent people from having to maintain it,
let's move it to drivers/staging/ so that we can delete it entirely from
the kernel in a few releases.

(diving into an early boot crash)

Have you tried running this? ;-)

irda_init() and net_dev_init() are both subsys_initcall()s.
But the former now runs before the latter, leading to:

Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000004

Should be fixed by https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/807006/
("[net-next] staging: irda: force to be a kernel module") I guess...

Yup, that's the fix for this issue.

Geert, does that fix the problem for you?

Thanks, that patch fixes the crash, obviously.

It does mean you can no longer have IrDA in a non-modular kernel.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds