Comment 2 for bug 7249

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 21:39:08 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <email address hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <email address hidden>
Subject: kernel-source-2.6.7: Modular fan support could result in hardware damage

Package: kernel-source-2.6.7
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system

If the kernel notifies the hardware that it is acpi-aware, then the
hardware may hand over control of cooling to the OS. However, if the
fan module (and possibly thermal.ko) is not loaded, the OS is unable to
do so. This will probably lead to the hardware overheating, resulting in
either instability (the hardware will shut itself off) or damage (if the
thermal cutoff threshold is set too high). hotplug and discover are
unable to automatically load acpi modules at present.

The acpid package will load acpi modules automatically. However, it's
not clear whether it can be installed early enough in a d-i run to be
helpful (if the d-i kernel is acpi, then there could be some time before
a sensible number of modules have been loaded - a laptop being floppy
booted for a network install, for instance).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i586)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.7
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8