Re: [PATCH v2 12/15] ath10k: use new module_firmware_crashed()

[Brian Norris]

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 10:37 PM Emmanuel Grumbach <egrumbach@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> So I believe we already have this uevent, it is the devcoredump. All
> we need is to add the unique id.

I think there are a few reasons that devcoredump doesn't satisfy what
either Luis or I want.

1) it can be disabled entirely [1], for good reasons (e.g., think of
non-${CHIP_VENDOR} folks, who can't (and don't want to) do anything
with the opaque dumps provided by closed-source firmware)
2) not all drivers necessarily have a useful dump to provide when
there's a crash; look at the rest of Luis's series to see the kinds of
drivers-with-firmware that are crashing, some of which aren't dumping
anything
3) for those that do support devcoredump, it may be used for purposes
that are not "crashes" -- e.g., some provide debugfs or other knobs to
initiate dumps, for diagnostic or debugging purposes

Brian

[1] devcd_disabled
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/base/devcoredump.c?h=v5.6#n22