Re: Check for BIOS bugs - Original Subject: Re: [PATCH 23/70]ACPICA: Workaround for reversed _PRT entries from BIOS

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Tue Jul 08 2008 - 18:10:41 EST


Hi!

> >>> FIRMWARE_BUG_ON(severity, description, component);
> >>
> >> Yes, please.
>
> I'm not excited about maintaining
> maintaining linux-as-a-firmware-diagnostic --
> particularly when...
>
> 1. it clutters the code for normail machines
> 2. finding the bug is pointless, because even
> if you fix one machine, you are guaranteed to
> not fix all machines and thus must maintain
> the workaround anyway.

Well, at least we can make sure new machines are okay.

Plus, it is nice to know how common hw/BIOS problems are.

> >> I'd also like HARDWARE_BUG_ON(), with similar usage.
> >>
> >> With all the preload-linux-on-foo project, we have some
> >> chance to make
> >> BIOS vendors fix their stuff if we can easily diagnose errors in
> >> there.
>
> These customers should be running
> http://linuxfirmwarekit.org/
>
> We do maintain some degree of "high-road ACPI spec checking"
> with the "acpi=strict" boot option. If we do more of this,
> I think it should stay under that option.

That's okay with me, but it would be nice to have printk() markup, so
that we can tell BIOS/hw bugs from normal kernel messages.
Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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