RELENG7 using lpt causes panic

John Baldwin jhb at freebsd.org
Tue Jan 8 17:37:12 PST 2008


On Tuesday 08 January 2008 10:32:56 am John Baldwin wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 January 2008 10:08:05 am Scott Long wrote:
> > John Baldwin wrote:
> > > On Monday 07 January 2008 10:08:57 pm Adrian Wontroba wrote:
> > >> I've recently switched some of my home systems to RELENG7.
> > >>
> > >> All seemed fairly well until I tried printing a CUPS test page on my
> > >> backup and print server to an elderly Laserjet IIIp, where I seem to
> > >> have a reproducible panic. It has happened twice.  This is painful, as
> > >> I have a big home fileystem (striped over two mirrors over most of two
> > >> 500 GB disks). The gmirror syncronisation and background fsck leave the
> > >> system close to unusable for hours while they fight over the disks.
> > >>
> > >> I was somewhat startled that something so basic as printing causes a
> > >> panic. There have been no hardware changes since I last printed under
> > >> RELENG6, but I don't print often, so hardware decay is a possibility.
> > >>
> > >> Is this a known problem? If not, I'll take the time to try various tests
> > >> (with /home unmounted) and raise a PR.
> > >>
> > >> I envisage tests such as:
> > >> * Does switching to a kernel without SMP and apic make a difference?
> > >> * Does direct output cause a crash?
> > >> * Does polling make a difference?
> > >> * Does the parallel port mode (I think extended at present) make a
> > >>   difference?
> > >>
> > >> Some detail below.
> > > 
> > > This is a known issue and it has to do with some changes in the interrupt
> > > code in 7.x that interact badly with the lpt(4) driver (which tears down its
> > > interrupt handler and sets it back up again for each character, and the
> > > panic you see is because an interrupt came when it wasn't expecting it).
> > > The lpt(4) driver does this weird dance to allow coexisting with vpo so you
> > > can have lpd running and unplug your printer and plug up a Zip drive w/o
> > > having to stop lpd.  I think the way I want to fix it is to change the lpt
> > > driver to not release the bus (and thus remove its interrupt handler) for
> > > every char but to keep the bus while /dev/lpt0 is open (which would be all
> > > the time with lpd running).
> > > 
> > 
> > My guess is that LPT ZIP drives all died a clicking death many, many 
> > years ago.  I usually don't advocate for the removal of hardware 
> > support, but these drives were so pitiful and so poorly engineered that
> > I honestly doubt there is any value in keeping the driver around.
> 
> It's not a matter of removing vpo(4) so much as reworking the various ppbus
> drivers to not be so fancy with trying to drop and release the ppbus but
> only do that in open/close.

As mentioned on current@, there is a sort of quick-hack patch available for
testing at http://www.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/ppbus_intr.patch and you can
see the post to current@ for more details.  I chose a quick-hack approach
for now as it is less risky than more proper fixes for ppbus/lpt/etc.

-- 
John Baldwin


More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list