Re: linux-2.4.19-pre9-ac3: PnPBIOS crash

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 2002-05-31 at 23:08, Chris Rankin wrote:
> I have a dual PIII machine with 1.25 GB of RAM, and I have just
> installed a 2.4.19-pre9-ac3 kernel. (I also have ALSA CVS and lm
> sensors 2.6.3 installed.)
> 
> Anyway, I decided to compile in the PNPBIOS feature and discovered
> that:
> 
> # cat /proc/bus/pnp/escd
> 
> is a synonym for "cold reboot". Now I understand that *writing* to
> random /proc files is a Bad Thing, but reading them??? I would have
> thought that the worst I could have done would have been corrupting my
> termininal. Is the escd file my actual ESCD area?
> 
> Is this a bug, or just a case of "don't do that!"?

Could be either. It should dump the ESCD by asking the BIOS for it. It
could be there is a case we are calling wrong, could be a BIOS bug where
the BIOS can't handle BIOS32 ESCD

Alan