Re: [PATCH] firmware: Be a bit more verbose about direct firmwareloading failure

From: Neil Horman
Date: Fri Sep 13 2013 - 11:01:05 EST


On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:56:39AM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Sep 2013, Neil Horman wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 03:46:30PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > > On Thu, 12 Sep 2013, Neil Horman wrote:
> > > > Both of these execptions should be rare, and are something the administrator
> > > > will want to know about, so as not to confuse the real error with the mystery
> > > > -ENOENT you would get if you fell back to the user mode helepr and it wansn't
> > > > configured on in the running kernel.
> > >
> > > Except, of course, for Intel processor microcode updates, which are going to
> > > cause ENOENT on a large number of systems.
> > >
> > > This will generate a large number of questions by users on the distro MLs.
> > >
> > > However, IMHO this is *not* a reason to refuse this patch series. If
> > > anything, at least for Debian I will use it as an opportunity to educate
> > > people about the existence of microcode update packages in "non-free".
> > >
> > I agree. If people are running with downlevel microcode, they shold know about
> > it. You can't expect request_firmware to fail silently. If people complain, I
> > think the right solution would be to add a test to the microcode_request_fw
> > function to check for the existence of the file before requesting it.
>
> Make it a firmware loader API for "optional" firmware (i.e. which doesn't
> complain on ENOENT), leaving for the caller the detail of whether a
> firmware-not-there failure should be logged or not.
>
That makes sense, I'll subit that in a separate patch this afternoon
Thanks!
Neil

> --
> "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
> them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
> where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
> Henrique Holschuh
>
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