Re: [patch 00/37] PNP resource_table cleanups, v2

[Bjorn Helgaas]

On Thursday 03 April 2008 09:54:51 am Rene Herman wrote:
> However, now that you made me look closer and in context -- there's actually 
> a possibly somewhat serious problem here.
> 
> isapnp_read_resources() stores the resources as read from the hardware at 
> the index in the table that matches the actual index in the hardware and 
> isapnp_set_resources() stores them back into those same hardware indices.
> 
> Now by using pnp_add_foo_resource() which just scans for the first _UNSET 
> resource, the resources might not end up in the same linear position in 
> table/list if intermediate resources were unset in hardware (!ret). A 
> subsequent isapnp_set_resources() would them restore the value to the wrong 
> hardware index.
> 
> The IORESOURCE_ flags currently reserve too few bits (IORESOURCE_BITS,  8) 
> to be able to store the hardware index: IORESOURCE_MEM and IORESOURCE_DMA 
> need 2 and 1 respectively and there are 1 and 0 available respectively. It's 
> ofcourse possible to hijack a few more bits in IORESOURCE_ flags but you're 
> turning this into a list. I suppose the idea is to make it a simple list of 
> struct resource, but perhaps a resource-private "driver_data" sort of field 
> comes in handy for more than this already? Swiping more of IORESOURCE_ is a 
> bit ugly...
> 
> In any case, I missed this, but ISAPnP is still (at least in principle) 
> broken with the current set therefore.

Hmm...  you're right.  And I think it could bite PNPBIOS and PNPACPI
as well -- they don't read/write hardware registers directly, but the
firmware still depends on preserving the resource order.  I'll have to
ponder that for a while.

Bjorn
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