David Haller said the following on 06/26/2012 01:16 PM:
ACK. I find the kernel code quite readable, the stuff I don't get is either deeply nested functions/macros (which I'm theoretically just too lazy to follow), but more often it's some "bitbanging" hardware specific code where even the one who wrote that code can tell you only: "that's what works, that's what you have to do, or the HW will {"not do anything", "fail miserably doing what it's supposed to do", "just hang", "freeze your box entirely", "cause it to emit it's magic smoke"}...
There is that. Back in the PDP-11 days I wrote a disk driver that could correct _some_ crc errors. There was a 'magic number', a hunk of octal, that when applied to the value in an error register either told you where - what the error was and let you correct it. Or it didn't. Some genius who knew about CRC came up the the string of bytes. I only coded it into the disk driver. It worked. or it didn't. It worked often enough that we were happy. The closest I've got to 'magic smoke' was the driver that drove the disk head past the end of the disk. Bloody stupid acceleration algorithm! -- Marketing is the science of convincing us that What You Get Is What You Want. -- John Carter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org