Re: [PATCH 1/3] Introduce FW_INFO* functions and messages

[Prarit Bhargava]

Sorry everyone, I was out on PTO for the past few weeks.


On 12/06/2013 07:30 AM, Matt Fleming wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Dec, at 07:55:03AM, Joe Perches wrote:
>> On Thu, 2013-12-05 at 11:30 +0000, Matt Fleming wrote:
>>> On Wed, 04 Dec, at 07:22:57PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>>> The other part I noticed about this particular patchset is that it's
>>>> not really "firmware" as such, but specifically PC wiht ACPI that
>>>> gets covered here. So rather than generalizing the code, another
>>>> option would be to narrow down the scope and make it
>>>> acpi_{warn,info,dbg} instead.
>>>
>>> Making this specific to ACPI runs the risk of people introducing a
>>> multitude of new logging functions for every subsystem, e.g.
>>> efi_{warn,info,dbg}.
>>
>> There are many subsystem specific logging functions:
> 
> Surely that's further justification to not introduce any more.

That's what I was thinking when I saw this discussion.

> 
>>> FWIW, I'd be interested in using something like this patch series to
>>> properly log EFI implementation bugs. The logging for EFI is currently
>>> done fairly haphazardly.
>>
>> I thought that was the point of embedding the existing
>> FW_INFO, FW_WARN and FW_BUG #defines in formats.
>>
>> Using logging message scraping to find faults is not
>> a great approach as message content is subject to change.
> 
> I wasn't planning on using them to scrape the kernel logs, just for more
> informative messages.

Exactly.  That's the whole point here -- the only mechanism that exists for
tracking firwmare related issues, like it or not, is the kernel log/dmesg/boot
log/whatever we're calling it these days.  It's been done this way since the
beginning of time.

The problem I'm trying to solve, and as Andrew commented on, is a *real*
problem.  The information we currently dump out is not useful to anyone.

Could this be expanded to other subsystems?  Yes, without question.  It's
actually the ACPI and PCI subsystems that I want to target next, however, both
of those will require a base change to FW_{INFO|WARN|BUG} to at least get us a
starting point.

P.

> 
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