linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] thermal: sun8i: Be loud when probe fails

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Date:   Mon, 13 Jul 2020 01:29:42 +0200
From:   Ondřej Jirman <megous@...ous.com>
To:     Maxime Ripard <maxime@...no.tech>
Cc:     linux-sunxi@...glegroups.com,
        Vasily Khoruzhick <anarsoul@...il.com>,
        Yangtao Li <tiny.windzz@...il.com>,
        Zhang Rui <rui.zhang@...el.com>,
        Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@...aro.org>,
        Amit Kucheria <amit.kucheria@...durent.com>,
        Chen-Yu Tsai <wens@...e.org>,
        "open list:ALLWINNER THERMAL DRIVER" <linux-pm@...r.kernel.org>,
        "moderated list:ARM/Allwinner sunXi SoC support" 
        <linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org>,
        open list <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] thermal: sun8i: Be loud when probe fails

Hi Maxime,

On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 03:57:48PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 03:44:41PM +0200, Ondřej Jirman wrote:
> > >

[...]

> > > Yeah, but on the other hand, we regularly have people that come up and
> > > ask if a "legitimate" EPROBE_DEFER error message (as in: the driver
> > > wasn't there on the first attempt but was there on the second) is a
> > > cause of concern or not.
> > 
> > That's why I also added a success message, to distinguish this case. 
> 
> That doesn't really help though. We have plenty of drivers that have
> some sort of success message and people will still ask about that error
> message earlier.
> 
> > > > And people run several distros for 3-4 months without anyone noticing any
> > > > issues and that thermal regulation doesn't work. So it seems that lack of a
> > > > success message is not enough.
> > > 
> > > I understand what the issue is, but do you really expect phone users to
> > > monitor the kernel logs every time they boot their phone to see if the
> > > thermal throttling is enabled?
> > 
> > Not phone users, but people making their own kernels/distributions. Those people
> > monitor dmesg, and out of 4 distros or more nobody noticed there was an issue
> > (despite the complaints of overheating by their users).
> > 
> > So I thought some warning may be in order, so that distro people more easily
> > notice they have misconfigured the kernel or sometging.
> 
> I mean, then there's nothing we can do to properly address that then.
> 
> The configuration system is a gun, we can point at the target, but
> anyone is definitely free to shot themself in the foot.
> 
> You would have exactly the same result if you left the thermal driver
> disabled, or if you didn't have cpufreq support.

Right. Though I hope there's some middle ground. I mean all of those dev_err
in error paths of many drivers are there mostly to help debugging stuff.

And even though I was part of this driver's development, it took me quite
some time to figure out it was the missing sunxi-sid driver causing the issue,
with complete silence from the driver.

Maybe this can/will be solved at another level entirely, like having a device
core report devices probes that failed with EPROBE_DEFER some time after
the boot finished and modules had a chance to load, instead of immediately
for each probe retry.

regards,
	o.

> Maxime