I cannot upgrade kernel from 2.6.32-gentoo-r7 to linux-2.6.34-gentoo-r1 due to three regressions: 1. sn9c102 camera (gspca driver) cannot be used; error message after upgrade is: gspca: found int in endpoint: 0x83, buffer_len=256, interval=100 2. either yenta socket or pcmcia rs232c adapter driver throws tons of errors, it is too fast for me to read; these errors prevents system from boot, so no traces in log files; disabling PCMCIA completely allowed system to start cleanly 3. external firewire drive cannot be mounted as /home and /var/spool at startup, user homes aren't accessible until I mount these partitions manually according to /etc/fstab settings! /etc/fstab isn't read at start anymore?! Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. update kernel 2. pray 3. Actual Results: failures Expected Results: no failures
Please test with gentoo-sources-2.6.36. It really helps to have separate bugs for separate issues for tracking purposes.
Since these are mission critical machines (seems to be typical situation for non-x86!), I can't experiment with kernels too deeply, only with small steps. I've tried to update carefully to 2.6.34-gentoo-r12 (at present, newest stabilized on PPC) on the machine which has the problem number 3, and I can confirm: the problem is gone, all high-capacity FireWire disks mounted automatically at boot time using /etc/fstab directives. sn9c102 camera and pcmcia rs232c adaper are installed on even more mission-critical machine so I don't even know when I'll be able to do any updates there.
Point 1 won't be fixed: I have done some test with this camera on x86 PC: on 2.6.32 kernel it works as expected with resolution 352x288 while on 2.6.36 it can't work with resolution higher than 176x144 which is not enough for me; this avoids me from doing further tests back on PPC. This way kernel developers forced me to buy new USB camera before any further kernel upgrade. Too bad. Point 2 will be proceeded after I buy new USB camera (uvc-compatible I guess) for this machine (2 months or so - I don't want to touch it without any very important reason)
It turned out that Point 2 is the infamous "Transfer error ack signal" bug on yenta/PPC. Unfortunately, it is still present in 2.6.39-gentoo-r3 (latest stable for ppc)
Disabling ISA bus and i82365 PCMCIA socket solves the problem (yenta socket and PCMCIA card that is very important for me still works). Tested on kernel 3.2.1-r2.
