KernelTrap - David Miller

what is an APE memory?

skokal01 — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:16:08 +0000

Hey I was going through Broadcom Tigon 3 drivers code and I see that APE memory is mapped using pic_ioremap_bar(pdev,BAR_2).

I couldn't any information in the broadcom datasheet about APE memory. What is an APE memory and what exactly it is used for?

http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.33/drivers/net/tg3.c#L14499

Thanks,
Santhosh Kokala

Quote: Time Is Often What Shakes Out Problems

Jeremy — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:52:47 +0000

"I like to make sure some time passes between when a fix goes into Linus's tree and when I push it into -stable because time is often what shakes out the last remaining problems introduced by some change no matter how seemingly obvious the patch is."

Quote: We Read Over The Code And Learned How It Worked

Jeremy — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:14:57 +0000

"Look at anyone who is extremely nimble with the kernel, and ask them what they worked on to get going with development. Did Andrew Morton fixup whitespace errors when he was starting to become familiar with the tree? Did I?

Bugs And Bureaucracy

Jeremy — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:35:52 +0000

A thread on the Linux Kernel mailing list discussed the process in place for reporting, bisecting and fixing bugs. In response to a suggestion that some of the issues could be solved by introducing new procedures, Al Viro retorted, "we've got ourselves a developing beaurocracy. As in 'more and more ways of generating activity without doing anything even remotely useful'. Complete with tendency to operate in the ways that make sense only to bureaucracy in question and an ever-growing set of bylaws..." Later in the thread, David Miller agreed and noted that ,"the resulting 'bureaucracy' or whatever you want to call it is perceived to undercut the very thing that makes the Linux kernel fun to work on. It's still largely free form, loose, and flexible. And that's a notable accomplishment considering how much things have changed. That feeling is why I got involved in the first place, and I know it's what gets other new people in and addicted too."

Andrew Morton tried to return the discussion to its original topic, "the problem we're discussing here is the apparently-large number of bugs which are in the kernel, the apparently-large number of new bugs which we're adding to the kernel, and our apparent tardiness in addressing them." Al noted that some of the problem is that git is so efficient at merging code, "the patches going in during a merge (especially for a tree that collects from secondaries) are not visible enough. And it's too late at that point, since one has to do something monumentally ugly to get Linus revert a large merge. On the scale of Great IDE Mess in 2.5..." Another suggestion was made to replace bugzilla with something better, to which Andrew replied, "swapping out bugzilla for something else wouldn't help. We'd end up with lots of people ignoring a good bug tracking system just like they were ignoring a bad one."

Quote: Not Investing the Necessary Time

Jeremy — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:34:59 +0000

"Every single argument you make that supports why you should not be investing the necessary time into the bug applies equally to the very developers you are so quick to quip at and want help from."

Quote: A Fart In A Spacesuit

Jeremy — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:48:16 +0000

"About as cool as a fart in a spacesuit."

Quote: Don't Panic

Jeremy — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:21:52 +0000

"It's ascii art I took it from someone's signature 12 years ago, it's meant to be the guy on the cover of some of the editions of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Don't Panic! :-)"

Quote: Quality of the Bug Report

Jeremy — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 03:44:42 +0000

"This case is a good example to use the next time a stupid thread starts up about bug reports not being looked into. To me it seems clearly more a matter of the quality of the bug report."

Quote: Glacial Development Pace

Jeremy — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 02:40:09 +0000

"Yeah, if you develop at the glacial pace Solaris does, don't add any features to cyclics or work on scalability improvements, sure it can be bug free and untouched for 6 years."