Subject: Re: SiS 85C496 host-PCI bridge reported broken by kernel
To: Anders Dinsen <anders@dinsen.net>
From: Nathan J. Williams <nathanw@MIT.EDU>
List: tech-kern
Date: 01/19/2001 11:54:31
Anders Dinsen <anders@dinsen.net> writes:

> But I'd still like to know what facts are behind this. Also it seems that
> more than two years after this code was put in, it still only concerns
> that single chipset. Does'nt NetBSD have a 'knowledge' base, where these
> things could be documented. It occurs to me that the kernel is not the
> right place for that, since the world will always produce broken
> chipsets, meaning that if nobody does anything, then the entropy of the
> kernel will just rise and rise (thus following the second law of
> thermodynamics) :-)

Well, for other classes of devices (most notably SCSI devices), there
are "quirk tables" that have bits describing the various and sundry
failures of a device. I don't see the overhead in having one of those
here to be worthwhile, though, until and unless we discover more
brokenness like this.

        - Nathan