Bug#490694: Extra video card seems to be the problem

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

severity 490694 normal
quit

Jeffrey Green wrote:

> I have a yes and no answer for you. Yes, I'm not sure whether the
> problem still exists and consequently am assuming it does. And no
> since unfortunately my powermac is not hooked up right now and
> cannot easily be set up since I'm without monitor for the time
> being. I'm living from a laptop at the moment. If I could get my
> hands on a monitor, then I'd be willing to set it up (and track down
> my extra graphics card that I had removed from the system to get it
> to work).

Hm, thanks.

> One little piece of into that I'm not sure I gave previously is that
> I think this problem, or a very similar one, appeared in the circa
> 2002 time frame.

Oh, that's interesting.

[...]
> One fact is, it did break, it was graphics card related, and
> modifying the kermel "fixed" it.

Was your fix applied upstream, or was it a local workaround?

[...]
> So, I'm not sure if I've helped in terrms of what to do with this
> bug (at this moment). If you'd really like to get to the bottom of
> the issue, then I might (just might) be able to track a monitor down
> for some testing purposes.

It's up to you.  I'd certainly like to get to the bottom of crashy
bugs like this to make the behavior of the kernel more predictable and
change the slope of the following graph:

  http://qa.debian.org/data/bts/graphs/l/linux-2.6.png

but ultimately, you would be doing the work of testing patches if
upstream comes up with any.  If you don't want to pursue this, one
possibility might be to document what we know somewhere under
Documentation/powerpc/ and forget about it until the next person hits
this.

Thanks,
Jonathan