Re: [RFC PATCH 0/9] dt: dependencies (for deterministic driver initialization order based on the DT)

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 




Am 14.05.2014 20:16, schrieb Alexander Holler:
Am 14.05.2014 19:53, schrieb Alexander Holler:
Am 14.05.2014 19:45, schrieb Alexander Holler:

One of the biggest problem of the deferred probe stuff is the problem
how to identify real problems if everything ends up with a deferred
probe when an error occurs? That means if you display an error whenever
something is deferred, the log becomes almost unreadable. If you don't
display an error, you never will see an error. And how do you display
the real error when deferred probes finally do fail? The deferred probe
stuff doesn't has any information about the underlying error, so it
can't display it.

And that is a real problem. I've recently tried to identify why a driver
failed and it was a nightmare because nothing offered any message (debug
or not) when a probe was deferred. So I had to insert tons of printks to
walk upwards to find the finally place where the probe failed.
Everything afterwards just has forwarded the -EPROBE_DEFER without
printing any message.

To add some numbers, I had to insert around 20-30 printks in around 10
or more files to find the underlying problem. Having to do such whenever
an error happens because everything assumes the error will disappear in
a later try, which doesn't happen for real errors, is just a nightmare.

And to give other people an idea how such a nightmare which has become reality does look like:

You see a driver fails (through the deferred stuff). You look at that the driver and see around 5-10 places which return or forward an -EPROBE_DEFER. You add printks (to all or just some of them, hopefully the right ones, but Murphy ...). Then you go to the underlying functions. You see again several places which do the same, you add again printks. You go to the underlying functions ...

Finally you've created a tree full with nodes of printks, searching for the one leaf which is the origin of the -EPROBE_DEFER for your problem.

Regards,

Alexander Holler

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html




[Index of Archives]     [Device Tree Compilter]     [Device Tree Spec]     [Linux Driver Backports]     [Video for Linux]     [Linux USB Devel]     [Linux PCI Devel]     [Linux Audio Users]     [Linux Kernel]     [Linux SCSI]     [XFree86]     [Yosemite Backpacking]
  Powered by Linux