[RFC PATCH v2 4/4] acpi: apei: Warn when GHES marks correctable errors as "fatal"

From: Alexandru Gagniuc
Date: Mon Apr 16 2018 - 17:59:40 EST


There seems to be a culture amongst BIOS teams to want to crash the
OS when an error can't be handled in firmware. Marking GHES errors as
"fatal" is a very common way to do this.

However, a number of errors reported by GHES may be fatal in the sense
a device or link is lost, but are not fatal to the system. When there
is a disagreement with firmware about the handleability of an error,
print a warning message.

Signed-off-by: Alexandru Gagniuc <mr.nuke.me@xxxxxxxxx>
---
drivers/acpi/apei/ghes.c | 10 +++++++++-
1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/drivers/acpi/apei/ghes.c b/drivers/acpi/apei/ghes.c
index e0528da4e8f8..6a117825611d 100644
--- a/drivers/acpi/apei/ghes.c
+++ b/drivers/acpi/apei/ghes.c
@@ -535,13 +535,14 @@ static const struct ghes_handler *get_handler(const guid_t *type)
static void ghes_do_proc(struct ghes *ghes,
const struct acpi_hest_generic_status *estatus)
{
- int sev, sec_sev;
+ int sev, sec_sev, corrected_sev;
struct acpi_hest_generic_data *gdata;
const struct ghes_handler *handler;
guid_t *sec_type;
guid_t *fru_id = &NULL_UUID_LE;
char *fru_text = "";

+ corrected_sev = GHES_SEV_NO;
sev = ghes_severity(estatus->error_severity);
apei_estatus_for_each_section(estatus, gdata) {
sec_type = (guid_t *)gdata->section_type;
@@ -563,6 +564,13 @@ static void ghes_do_proc(struct ghes *ghes,
sec_sev, err,
gdata->error_data_length);
}
+
+ corrected_sev = max(corrected_sev, sec_sev);
+ }
+
+ if ((sev >= GHES_SEV_PANIC) && (corrected_sev < sev)) {
+ pr_warn("FIRMWARE BUG: Firmware sent fatal error that we were able to correct");
+ pr_warn("BROKEN FIRMWARE: Complain to your hardware vendor");
}
}

--
2.14.3