Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 14:04:42 +0100
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Knut Petersen <Knut_Petersen@t-online.de>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       trenn@suse.de, pavel@ucw.cz, mjg59@srcf.ucam.org, lenb@kernel.org
Subject: Re: 2.6.22 regression: thermal trip points
Message-ID: <20070802140442.62c56dbd@the-village.bc.nu>
In-Reply-To: <20070802120511.GA440@one.firstfloor.org>
References: <46B1988C.3090302@t-online.de>
	<20070802015248.45a40717.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
	<p731wemnre6.fsf@bingen.suse.de>
	<20070802120014.1d08830a@the-village.bc.nu>
	<20070802120511.GA440@one.firstfloor.org>
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> > Set a taint flag, 
> That's hardly any useful if the machine is dead afterwards.

It won't be the hardware will do a failsafe shutdown first.

> You'll just end up with "Linux destroyed my laptop" headlines all 
> over the internet and rightfully very annoyed users.

You have to systematically sit down and tweak your machine.

> The philosophy didn't include physically destroying hardware
> as far as I know.

It most certainly did. With safety checks you could override.

> > As root you can erase the bios, 
> We don't ship the devbios driver for good reasons.

Thats debatably a bad reason (the user space API is wrong thats all), and
one thats totally inconsistent with some of the other drivers we do ship.

> > lock the hard disk with a random
> > password, reflash your video card .... 
> 
> That all requires significant effort and custom software. It's not that we 
> have a one liner echo destroy > /sys/.../flash-bios. 

Well you can do the hard disk one in one line of perl, the video card one
in a small bit of C. And this merely makes the argument that raising the
trip points should be harder.

Alan
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