Bugs to watch
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Kernel Bug 10893 - alpha: Can't access PCI device resources through sysfs
Background
The xserver has historically used platform specific code to access PCI resources such as ROM information and video memory. With the 1.5 release, PCI access will be done through a generic user-space cross-platform library, libpciaccess. libpciaccess requires the kernel to implement a common interface to access PCI resources through sysfs. Until now, this hasn't been needed on Alpha and therefore has not been implemented. This feature is required by libpciaccess, and in turn, the xserver.
Essentially, platform dependent code has been moved from user-space to kernel-space.
Implications
X11 will be unable to start on Linux systems whose kernel does not implement this feature on the Alpha platform. To use X11, an xserver release from the 1.4 branch or earlier would be necessary. As time goes on, an increasing number of new features and bug fixes provided by more recent xservers will be unavailable to Alpha users.
Due to limitations of executing code in kernel-space, the BWX extension appears to be required. For Alpha processors lacking the BWX extension, such as the EV5 and earlier, the ability to use future xserver releases is unclear.
Solutions
Ivan Kokshaysky has assigned himself to fixing this. Originally, he was attempting to implement this feature in time for the 2.6.27 kernel release, but with 2.6.27 released, no word has been received on the status of this bug.
A work-around in libpciaccess used to access PCI resources through /dev/mem may be a way to support X11 on non-BWX Alphas.
