On 12/16/2009 02:23 AM, Huang Ying wrote: > On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 01:47 +0800, Bjorn Helgaas wrote: >> On Monday 14 December 2009 06:04:13 pm Huang Ying wrote: ... >>> The checking here is for bug in firmware not software. I think it is >>> necessary for the user to know where the bugs may come from, and it is >>> hard to express the bug in return code. >> >> Yes, I understand that this is checking for firmware bugs. My point >> is that when a user sees this in his dmesg log: >> >> Invalid bit width in GAR, firmware bug? >> >> we have no context, and even a kernel developer can't figure out what >> to do. We could ask for a copy of the FADT and DSDT, but even then, >> we don't know *which* GAR structure to look at, so we'll probably have >> to add some instrumentation and ask the user to reproduce the problem. >> >> If the check were in the caller, it could at least say something like: >> >> ACPI: couldn't map generic address [io 0xcf8] for PCI config access >> >> which would give us more useful information. > > En... Yes, some information about the invalid GAR is helpful. But the > GAR information is available in acpi_check_gar too, so we can output > something as follow in acpi_check_gar: > > Invalid bit width in GAR [mem 0x8029ff8 24], firmware bug? > > Your message looks like a software issue instead of firmware bug. This > may confuse the user and developer. Please use one of these (cmp. with include/linux/kernel.h when to use which): #define FW_BUG "[Firmware Bug]: " #define FW_WARN "[Firmware Warn]: " #define FW_INFO "[Firmware Info]: " It's great that someone cares to tell syslog/users that it's a firmware bug, that should get more common... Thomas -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-acpi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html