Hello, Jeff, Borislav.
I looked through the ata_msg_*() changes and read Donald Becker's
message about network driver message control. This is needed facility
and I agree with general direction, but I have slightly different ideas
about details.
We currently have the following message categories.
ATA_MSG_DRV = 0x0001,
ATA_MSG_INFO = 0x0002,
ATA_MSG_PROBE = 0x0004,
ATA_MSG_WARN = 0x0008,
ATA_MSG_MALLOC = 0x0010,
ATA_MSG_CTL = 0x0020,
ATA_MSG_INTR = 0x0040,
ATA_MSG_ERR = 0x0080,
* I have no idea what CTL means or why DRV is used in ata_dev_disable().
* By default, ATA_MSG_INFO is turned off, which means
ata_dev_configure() doesn't print anything about newly detected and
configured device, which isn't good (BTW, why is @print_info completely
ignored in that function? It's needed. We don't want to print those
messages when we're just revalidating devices.) Unfortunately, if I
enable ATA_MSG_INFO, I enable some of function ENTER/EXIT messages, too.
Bah...
* In ata_dev_configure(), some ENTER/EXIT messages are INFO while others
are PROBE.
* In ata_dev_read_id(), ENTER message is CTL, what is CTL? What makes
ata_port_flush_task() and ata_dev_read_id() share CTL? And, why are
flush#2/EXIT messages CTL while ENTER/flush#1 are left as DPRINTK?
All of the above problems are introduced during single sweep conversion
over libata-core.c. It might be that it simply was a bad sweep, but
with the current ambiguous definitions, I don't think things will be any
better when different people try to use those message types on various LLDs.
So, please make things *much* simpler. I think it's overly elaborate to
categorize normal (non-debug) messages by message types. In my
experience, such categorization usually ends up mis-categorization - you
know, "Is this PROBE or CTL? who cares? make it INFO. Is INFO debug or
normal message? WTF..."
IMHO, it's enough to have non-debug messages categorized by verbosity -
CRIT, ERR, WARN and INFO and all of them enabled by default. This also
forces developers to suppress the urge to be whiny and refine their
messages. Maybe we can add one more level below INFO for
slightly-verbose but not quite debug, but I think we're better off
without it.
For debug messages, we probably need some categorization to separate LLD
message from core messages and suppress command issue/completion debug
messages unless strictly necessary, etc... But, those categories MUST
be made by necessities (e.g. issue/completion messages suffocates other
messages, so they need separate slot.) not by some logical
out-of-the-blue categorization. Otherwise, we end up with categories
which may be obvious to some but not so to others and things will get messy.
Thanks.
--
tejun
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