[ltp] Alan Cox 2.4 PnP BIOS kernels

[S. Anthony Sequeira]

On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 21:59, Thomas Hood wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 22:22, S. Anthony Sequeira wrote:
> > Does anyone know whether Alan Cox is still patching the 2.4 kernels for
> > PnP BIOS.  The latest I have is 2.4.22-ac4.
> 
> I believe that all latter day 2.4-ac kernel sources include the
> PnP BIOS driver code.  This is the old driver, not the one that
> has been greatly reworked for Linux 2.6.
> 
> > Now that the 2.4 kernel is up 2.4.24, with no sign of the PnP BIOS in
> > them, I feel trapped at 2.4.22.  I do not wish to move to 2.6 until the
> > situation stabilises.
> > 
> > Is the PnP BIOS option absolutely necessary.  I see that Thomas Hood
> > uses 2.4.23 (when I last checked).
> 
> Actually I upgraded to 2.4.24 and recently to 2.6.0.  Just today
> I posted at http://panopticon.csustan.edu/thood/tp600lnx.htm a
> summary of my upgrade steps.

And I was just looking at your page for a link to the IBM PS2.exe page. 
Must be a caching issue, [just a minute, it was].

> I am very impressed with 2.6.0.  This isn't 2.4.0 all over again.
> So far it has been running as stably as 2.4.24 did even though I
> have been working it hard.  The only problem is APM suspend and
> it sounds as if Michael Hagemann and Charles Lepple have almost
> solved that one.
> 
> It is wonderful to be able to upgrade to 2.6 .  The new input
> drivers.  ALSA.  PnP BIOS.  Preemption.  The new build system.
> Better module handling.  The list goes on and on.  Altogether a
> huge improvement over 2.4.  Some of these features were already
> available for 2.4 but in most cases I decided that I would just
> wait until I upgraded.  I am grateful that upgrading has been so
> unpainful.  The biggest PITA was reverting from a devfs system
> to a traditional /dev/ directory, but most people won't have to
> go through that because they never adopted devfs.

Debian takes the pain out of it I guess.  I upgraded my desktop, and had
a couple of issues, specifically with compiling packages, and reverted. 
I run LFS on both machines, and I do not have a lot of time to chase
down problems. (OK enough violins there).

> > If I upgrade, will I be able to use tpctl and/or pcmcia-cs?
> 
> Yes, and if you have a 600X then there is also an ltmodem driver.

Thanks for the answer.  I will probably use 2.6 for my next LFS build, 
In the meantime I'll upgrade it to 2.4.24, before having a go at the
hibernation.
-- 
Tony