[hsflinux] modprobe for hsf driver making machine hang

[Josh Green]

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 14:40, reluctantconexantuser at driveconsultants.com
wrote:
> I have been having the same problem that has been reported by several others where running the modprobe to insert the hsfserial module causes a 2.6  kernel machine (gentoo in my case) to all but crash. I have investigated this and I fully understand the problem and 95% of the solution. I know exactly how to configure a working system that will load the required modules on demand, using the correct methods without any bodges.
> 
> If this was free software I would happily post the full solution here, however since Linuxant are charging us for the privilege of using the full blown driver I don't particularly want them to benefit from the several hours of work I have spent on this. I suppose if they were to send me a full licence I would publish my solution.
> 
> The solution of course lies in the modprobe.conf file. I know exactly what modifications are needed to this file, however I'm not 100% sure how to make a change in the modules.d/hsf file in such a way that it can be correctly translated. I must say, the current state in Linux where we in a transition from modules.conf to modprobe.conf is hardly satisfactory. The sooner we can do away with modules.conf the better, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent of modules.d that relates to modprobe.conf.

I also use gentoo and some of those posts were from me. Not sure if you
saw the email or not, but I believe it was one of the Linuxant
developers. It was mentioned that the problem is with module-init-tools
and modprobe. It gets into a recursive dependency situation where an
endless number of insmod processes get forked off, essentially forking
your machine :)  The fix mentioned was to upgrade to 3.0 of
module-init-tools. This doesn't work, at least with Gentoo, since the
bug appears to be there as well (it was the first version I was using
before I started trying older versions). For now I just have all the
modules load at boot time using /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 (they
load in the order of dependency) and removed the probeall lines from
/etc/modules.d/hsf.

I can understand your reluctance to share your hard earned information
to a project that isn't completely open. But unfortunately its the only
option for us poor users who happen to end up with one of these Conexant
software modems and want to use Linux (as I'm sure you know). I've been
tempted to just purchase another modem at times since I've been less
than satisfied with the Linuxant drivers and Linux kernel 2.6. Once I
resolved the modprobe issue though, things have been working fine
(despite some weired interaction from my ALSA PCM drivers and the modem,
which I'll describe in another email). I just hope it doesn't break with
the next kernel release. It just goes to show, with an open source
operating system its nice to have open hardware as well (which is no
fault of Linuxant's I'm sure). Cheers.
	Josh Green