Re: [LAU] mute laptop speakers with Intel HDA

At Mon, 6 Aug 2007 21:58:29 +0200,
Fons Adriaensen wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 07:13:12PM +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
>
> > Then, well, you made it really too dramatic. Requesting the update to
> > the latest kernel is a very standard procedure. Otherwise, the
> > developer cannot start real debugging at all.
>
> Not being a kernel/driver specialist at all, I do have some
> difficulty in believing this.
>
> The kernel has to call some routines in the driver, and provide
> some services to it. I find it difficult to imagine
>
> - how a kernel bug could affect just one driver and have no
> impact on all the others.

A "kernel bug" is too generic wording. In most cases, it's a bug in
other components that a driver depends on. For example, the kernel
memory management, scheduler, ACPI, IRQ handler, etc. are involved
with the sound driver. If one of them is broken, the driver doesn't
work.

> - that if there's anything wrong with these interfaces a system
> could work at all,

The kernel-internal inteface has been _always_ changed from kernel
version to version.

> I assume most drivers are using the same interfaces to the
> kernel, and the same services, and that these are relatively
> stable.

That's not true at all :) It's one of the reasons you get thousands
of patches at each kernel version up.

Don't get me wrong: the kernel <-> user-space API is (mostly) stable
over all versions. But the kernel internal is different.

Takashi
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Received on Tue Aug 7 16:15:01 2007