Known Issues with the PA-RISC Linux Kernel
This page lists known limitations of the current implementation of the PA-RISC Linux kernel. If not mentioned otherwise, this list applies to the latest GIT version (at the time of this writing this means version 2.6.22-rc2). Please note that this list is likely to be incomplete and is NOT meant to be a TODO or "wanted features" page! BTW, if you think you have found a bug not listed here then please report it to the PA-RISC Linux mailing list.
Some of the issues described here might never be resolved, partly due to the fact that documentation is unavailable/missing, it would not fit with the current kernel design or there is simply lack of manpower.
Missing/Incomplete PA-RISC specific Drivers
- VisualizeFX graphics cards
- No graphics support written, cards can only be used in text mode via the sticon driver. There is interest in a driver being written, but because no programming documentation has been released by HP this will be a difficult task.
- Accelerated X11 support for Visualize-EG graphics cards
- So far there is only basic framebuffer support via stifb. Lack of manuals/time.
- Full HP-UX support
- Right now only a very poor level of compatibility is provided. Actually it is possible that even this will be removed in the future; support for executing HP-UX binaries is difficult to do, and some things like HP-UX style threads will never work on linux.
- HP-PB bus and HP-PB cards
- This bus system and type of cards are mainly used on old HP9000/800 servers. Much of the programming manuals are not available, and since there is not much demand to support such old machines progress for these devices is almost non-existent (although some brave souls have been seen hacking on them from time to time)
- PA-8800 and PA-8900 support - the current kernel is quite unstable on these machines. The problem appears to have to do with cache management.
- ccio and ncr53c8xx (ncr53c720) - apparently not 64 bit clean
ns87415 - DMA support doesn't seem to work (transfer speeds <=3MB/s)
- snd_ad1889 - playing music with alsa native interface produces garbled sound, OSS emu does work however. This is because alsa native use mmap on the device, which parisc-linux doesn't support (yet).
- EISA DMA support is not implemented yet
LBA version TR4.0 (0x5) found at 0xfffffffffed3c000 allocation failed: out of vmalloc space - use vmalloc=<size> to increase size.
PCI-to-PCI bridge issue (loop in /proc/iomem /proc/ioports)
- Builtin Tulip failing autoneg
- Figure out why PA-8800 userspace is broken.
Freeing unused kernel memory: BUG: warning at arch/parisc/kernel/smp.c:348/smp_call_function()
On pa8800: parisc_cache_init: Only equivalent aliasing supported!
- The "Ctrl-C" bug
Broken Device Drivers and File Systems
Hardware drivers, networking support, file systems etc. that are expected to work on all supported architectures of the Linux kernel, but don't function properly on PA-RISC Linux:
matroxfb - 64 bit kernel issue: screen stays black, i.e. graphics card is not properly initialized <-- HAS THIS BEEN FIXED?
- Promise IDE P-ATA controller (PDC202XX_NEW) - DMA issues, but booting with 'nodma' works. Try a siimage controller if you really need IDE.
- XFS seems to be broken (heavy filesystem corruption).
Other Missing Features (related to palo, glibc, userspace etc.)
PA-hackers, please check whether the following list is up to date
Other items that do not fit into the other sections ...
- signal handling bug - in some cases signals appears to be dropped silently, or delivered to the wrong process.
- interrupt delivery bug?
- 64 bit userland
- missing bits:
- 64 bit binutils that will build DSO's
- 64 bit glibc
- Multiple stub sections for the 64 bit linker.
- NPTL
- TLS working
- FUTEX support being worked on
- Low latency
- Preempt
- XFree86/X.org BIOS init emulation support
- CPU hotplug
- HugeTLB page support
- MSI/MSI-X PCI device support