On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 04:23:55PM -0700, Steve deRosier wrote: > Specifically, I don't think we should set a taint flag when a driver > easily handles a routine firmware crash and is confident that things > have come up just fine again. In other words, triggering the taint in > every driver module where it spits out a log comment that it had a > firmware crash and had to recover seems too much. Sure, firmware > shouldn't crash, sure it should be open source so we can fix it, > whatever... those sort of wishful comments simply ignore reality and > our ability to affect effective change. A lot of WiFi firmware crashes > and for well-known cases the drivers handle them well. And in some > cases, not so well and that should be a place the driver should detect > and thus raise a red flag. If a WiFi firmware crash can bring down > the kernel, there's either a major driver bug or some very funky > hardware crap going on. That sort of thing we should be able to > detect, mark with a taint (or something), and fix if within our sphere > of influence. I guess what it comes down to me is how aggressive we > are about setting the flag. Exactly the crux of the issue. I hope that by now we should all be in agreement that at least a firmware crash requiring a reboot is something we should record and inform the user of. A taint seems like a reasonable standard practice for these sorts of things. > I would like there to be a single solution, or a minimized set > depending on what makes sense for the requirements. I haven't had time > to look into the alternatives mentioned here so I don't have an > informed opinion about the solution. I do think Luis is trying to > solve a real problem though. Can we look at this from the point of > view of what are the requirements? What is it we're trying to solve? > > I _think_ that the goal of Luis's original proposal is to report up to > the user, at some future point when the user is interested (because > something super drastic just occured, but long after the fw crash), > that there was a firmware crash without the user having to grep > through all logs on the machine. And then if the user sees that flag > and suspects it, then they can bother to find it in the logs or do > more drastic debugging steps like finding the fw crash in the log and > pulling firmware crash dumps, etc. Yes, that's exactly it. Not all users are clueful to inspect logs. I now have a generic uevent mechanism drafted which sends a uevent for *any* taint. So that is, it does not even depend on this series. But it accomplishes the goal of informing the user of taints. > I think the various alternate solutions are great but perhaps solving > a superset of features (like adding in user-space notifications etc)? > Perhaps different people on these related threads are trying to solve > different problems? The uevent mechanism I implemented (but not yet posted for review) at least sends out a smoke signal. I think that if each subsystem wants to expand on this with dumping facilities that is great too! Luis
