linux-kernel - Re: linux-next: Tree for June 13: IO APIC breakage on HP nx6325

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Message-Id: <200806292123.16237.rjw@sisk.pl>
Date:	Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:23:15 +0200
From:	"Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@...k.pl>
To:	"Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@...ux-mips.org>
Cc:	Matthew Garrett <mjg59@...f.ucam.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Stephen Rothwell <sfr@...b.auug.org.au>,
	linux-next@...r.kernel.org, LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	ACPI Devel Maling List <linux-acpi@...r.kernel.org>,
	Len Brown <lenb@...nel.org>,
	Andi Kleen <andi-suse@...stfloor.org>
Subject: Re: linux-next: Tree for June 13: IO APIC breakage on HP nx6325

On Sunday, 29 of June 2008, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Jun 2008, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> 
> > >  I believe I removed all the occurences.  I am waiting for a proposal of a
> > > quirk based on the DSDT ID -- my time is a bit too limited to study the
> > > internals of our ACPI code at the moment; sorry about that.  I will
> > > complement it with a change to remove IRQ0 from I/O APIC tables as
> > > promised then; this piece of code I am quite familiar with.
> > 
> > Well, why don't we use the DMI identification as suggested by Matthew?
> 
>  Because it checks the wrong property.
> 
> > I think we can safely assume that all of these boxes are broken for now and we
> > can use a more fine grained identification in the future, if necessary.
> 
>  It is the reverse -- checking the DSDT ID is coarser, matching all the
> systems that use the broken firmware.

How can you tell which DSDTs are broken until somebody reports them?

> With DMI we may face both false positives and false negatives which imply
> further maintenance actions.   

With DSDT matching you're likely to end up breaking systems the users of
which have not reported problems.

> Please note as proved over the years understanding of these issues seems
> to be problematic for people, so the result may be another round of
> discussions reinventing the wheel in a couple of years' time or so.
> 
>  That's my opinion only though -- if it was to hinder the progress, then I
> am not going to persist.

Good.

>  Have you tried to report the issue through the usual manufacturer's
> support channels, BTW?

My experience with HP indicates that it would have been a loss of time.

Apart from this, I've always been against forcing people to upgrade their
BIOSes just because we just had a briliant idea that made the kernel stop
working on their systems.  IMO it's extremely user-unfriendly and plain wrong.

Thanks,
Rafael
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