Bug 171481

Summary:	Segfault in powertweakd
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Stefan Siebert <stefan.siebert>
Component:	YaST2	Assignee:	Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Stanislav Visnovsky <visnov>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	suse-beta
Version:	RC 2
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	SuSE Linux 10.1
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	Yast2 logs

Description Stefan Siebert 2006-05-02 08:16:33 UTC

Start Yast2 and click on Powertweak. Yast wants to install the powertweak extra package from CD4. After installation it complaints about the configuration file cannot be created. Starting the powertweakd manually shows a segault message.

Seems to be related to bug #105273, but it doesn't shows the MSR message.

...the system is an AMD64X2 running the X64 SuSE Version 10.1 RC2, so this may not be related to OpenSuSE 10.1 i386.

The segfault message: May  2 10:08:05 srv01 kernel: powertweakd[23657]: segfault at 000000000000000a rip 00002b23f56296b0 rsp 00007fffb5bc0678 error 4

Comment 1 Christian Boltz 2006-05-02 12:40:41 UTC

Please attach the y2logs.

BTW: What package does YaST want to install?

Comment 2 Stefan Siebert 2006-05-04 09:50:50 UTC

Created attachment 81958 [details]
Yast2 logs

Not 100% sure anymore which package yast2 needed to install, but it was on CD4 and after I clicked on the powertweak button, so it should be the extra package for powertweak.

Comment 3 Christian Boltz 2006-05-04 21:05:55 UTC

Stefan, please always change the bug back to ASSIGNED after providing the requested information ;-)

Comment 4 Stanislav Brabec 2007-04-18 14:02:42 UTC

Powertweak was designed to work with kernel 2.0 and 2.2 and harware, which was
actual in years 1998-2000. It is unmaintained in upstream for six years.

It causes many problems for program, which tries to modify important values of
kernel, which changed a lot since these years. This bug is only a small side
effect.

These facts implies decision to deprecate powertweak with SLES10 SP1 and drop
for OpenSUSE 10.3 and SLES11.

If there will be a strong need for similar application, there can be created a
new applications with similar functions.


Rationale in details:

- Unmaitained since 2001.
- It has no tweaking support for hardware manufactured after 2001.
- It has no support for kernel parameters added after kernel 2.2.
- It has never been tested with newer kernels.
- It has no support for device hotplugging.
- Designed for deprecated gtk1.
- There are unfixed bugs.
- There are hardware specific crashes.

Other bugs: bug 36824, bug 151134, bug 179761, bug 190068, bug 176807 (many others were
fixed).

Several other bugs are obvious:
- glib critical warnings
- gtk critical warnings if daemon is not running (causes crash in GNOME betas)
- Kernel\Linux: At least 26 items here is incorrectly displayed.
- Kernel\Information: Incorrectly displayed.
- File->Load state: Reports only "Not implemented yet"

Only minor part of powertweak is still really usable:

Fine tuning of some kernel parameters:
It can be done via simple script doing echo "foo" >/(proc|sys)/foo

Fine tuning of some network kernel parameters for non-hotplugged devices:
It can be again done via simple script doing echo "foo" >/(proc|sys)/foo.
In this case, it needs some logic to know names of actual network interfaces.