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Marky
Asked: 2012-01-17 08:31:43 +0800 CST

Are card reader/writers supposed to poll all the time?

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I am looking at top and noticed that after I managed to get my USB2.0-CRW (Realtek chip and it's built into my laptop), its kernel module keeps on showing up. top says it's using 0.0 memory but 1% CPU, and priority is 20.

Is there some way to get this to stop polling and use, probably interrupts? I remember I read that this used to be a problem with optical drives on Linux. It would keep on polling after every few seconds. Just wondering if this is as simple as a command or a file to modify, perhaps a recompile of the driver/module, but if it needs rewriting the code, then I think there is not much that can be done.

Thanks.

*oh BTW: 2.6.38-13-generic kernel on Natty Narwhal, RTS5139

drivers

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The problem is in the design of the rts5139 driver, which is in the 'staging' portion in the kernel hierarchy, meaning it's not yet up to the quality standards of some of the other drivers.

    It seems, though, that the problem has been acknowledged on Linux driver development mailing list in May. However so far I'm not seeing changes after that in the kernel tree that would affect the actual problem. I can confirm that I'm seeing the polling on my machine in Ubuntu 12.10, and I'm doing the cumbersome 'rmmod rts5139' in /etc/rc.local to not used the card reader by default (I only use it rarely).

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