Re: [PATCH] x86/mce: Do feature check earlier

[Borislav Petkov]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 12:30:55PM -0500, Yazen Ghannam wrote:
> We may miss some information when errors are logged during boot before the
> feature flags are set. For example, on SMCA systems we will not log the
> MCA_IPID and MCA_SYND registers and we won't mask MCA_ADDR appropriately.

That paragraph really needs to explain what the problem is more
thoroughly. "We may miss some info" is not enough. I've done it for
you now but please take care to do this in the future.

A good way to structure your commit message is this:

 "The current state of affairs is A. This is a problem (because of B).
 In order to fix this, we should do C."

and then you go and fill in A, B and C. Depending on the issue, that
format won't always fit but it works most of the time. The general idea
is to describe the problem sufficiently so that a reader staring at this
months or even years from now can still understand what the issue was.

It is really important to have those things documented because when we
go and change the code in the future, we'd get a continuous picture of
why we did the things the way we did them then and to be able to change
them again.

Thanks.

---