Problems with Hotplug

[Le grand pinguin]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 03:55:12AM +0100, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> > But......it hung up on the first reboot this time. 
> > ...The only thing I can see being a problem is USB. That's a keyboard,
> > mouse, 2 jump drives, CD-writer, external 80GB drive. There are 2
> > external USB hubs, an internal hub and 2 USB cards in addition to the
> > builtin USB ports. The mouse and keyboard are both Logitech, shared
> > through a KVM switch with a Mac.
> 
> Oh my God, is really all that stuff USB ???
> Just remove ALL that stuff (you don't K/B nor mouse to boot !) and see
> what happens, then plug them back, one at a time. For each device you
> add, boot twice or thrice to be "about" sure the problems doesn't
> reappear. And don't use the dwithc for K/B and mouse, you never know.
> 
> I have never heard/read nothing but trouble stories with USB devices,
> whatever the kind of device. I haven't yet seen the usefulnes of USB
> devices, so sure enough, no USB stuff will ever make it to my computer.

??? You aren't serious, or? Never had any problems with usb devices on my
Mac. While i don't consider usb (at least version 1) to be an overly brilliant
technology it seems to work quite well (and definitly seems to be the near
future of (universal) external buses). Is your statement based on any real
expericence of your own (with kernels > 2.2) or just folk lore and bragging?

> Keybaord and mice have already a port of their own : PS/2, use it, it's
> bullet proof, why re-invent the wheel ?

Ok, you _are_ joking :-) Now, iff you had suggested a nice ol' Vt200 terminal
i would agree that there's a hard to beat stability, but PS/". Sheesh.
Those darn plugs aren't even hot-plugable! Great for a consumer device
(to all novices out there: _never_ replug PS/2 on a running box. It can
fry your mainboard). Don't tell me that you've done it and nothing happened.
We all have, but i've seen more than one roasted PS/2 controller ...
And if you are still not convinced  have a look at the ugly kernel code 
that initializes the PS/2 keyboard.

> 
> Scanners ? should be SCSI.
> 
> CD-writer external ? Get SCSI one as well.

Cool. I never encountered a more problematic bus system. Really _bad_
electrical design. I've done a _lot_ of SCSI stuff (mainly on Macs which
have rather good support) - more than once it ended up in "black magic".
Sometimes systems would work better _without_ proper termination, sometimes
5 cm more/less cable could solve the problems.

> 
> USB sticks ? Yes that's convenient, but then again, why not just use a
> re-writeable CD.

Looks kind of silly when put into a shirt pocket :-/

> Broadband modem ? Use Ethernet interface.
> 
> 
> The only thing that's interesting with USB, is connecting your digital
> camera and get it hotplugged as a storage device, then just drag and
> drop your pics into a local drive. That is wonderful. Thank god this
> seems to work fine. But for everything else, I would stay away from
> USB !!

Strange concept: you obviously never heard of firewire? 

Just my0.02 $ of rant

 RalfD