Re: [PATCH][RFC] Possible PnP BIOS GPF Solution for Sony VAIO and other laptops

[Adam Belay <ambx1@neo.rr.com>]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 01:09:57PM +1100, CaT wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 08:37:02PM +0000, Adam Belay wrote:
> > The PnP BIOS may be wandering into segement 0x40.  If that is the case,
> > this patch should fix the problem.  I do not have a buggy system so I
> > cannot test this patch but I'd be intersted to hear the results.  If you
> > have a system that has caused pnpbios problems in the past, I recommend
> > you try this patch.  If it works, the system will not panic on startup.
> > This patch is against 2.5.59 and separate from my other recent patches.
> 
> This boots fine here. Then again 2.5.59 booted fine aswell. :) I also
> don't get any oopses from reading /proc/bus/pnp stuff as I did before
> when I first reported issues. As with the bootup, I also don't get these
> issues with 2.5.59. (ie 2.5.59 works fine with or without this patch).

This can be explained.  When the pnpbios makes a get current resource call
on a buggy system it causes a GPF.  In 2.5.59 I designed the pnpbios driver
to avoid making this call when scanning for devices.  It uses a get boot
resource call instead.

In other words...

Without this patch, if you made the following change it would panic.

 		 * from devices that are can only be static such as
 		 * those controlled by the "system" driver.
 		 */
-		if (pnp_bios_get_dev_node(&nodenum, (char )1, node))
+		if (pnp_bios_get_dev_node(&nodenum, (char )0, node))
 			break;
 		nodes_got++;
 		dev =  pnpbios_kmalloc(sizeof (struct pnp_dev), GFP_KERNEL);

1 = boot config
0 = current config

Therefore it can be concluded that this patch does indeed solve the problem
for your system :-).

>
> Sorry for not getting back to you earlier btw... I lost almost a
> fortnights worth of email and yours was amongst them. :/
> 

Thank you for testing my patch.

Regards,
Adam