Re: FW: 2.6.24 breaks BIOS updates on all Dell machines

["Markus Rechberger" <markus.rechberger@amd.com>]

Matt_Domsch@Dell.com wrote:
> Markus, I see you were accidentally left off the cc: list on this bug.
> The change was yours, so I suspect you'll have an opinion to share with
> LKML.
>
> Thanks,
> Matt
>
> --
> Matt Domsch
> Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
> linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Greg KH [mailto:gregkh@suse.de] 
> Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:44 AM
> To: Brown, Michael E
> Cc: Jos?? Luis Tall??n; Warzecha, Douglas; Salunke, Abhay;
> linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; Domsch, Matt; marcel@holtmann.org
> Subject: Re: 2.6.24 breaks BIOS updates on all Dell machines
>
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 12:32:44AM -0600, Michael E Brown wrote:
>   
>> BIOS updates are broken on all Dell systems due to Commit
>> 109f0e93b6b728f03c1eb4af02bc25d71b646c59, which is now in 2.6.24.
>>
>>   static inline void fw_setup_device_id(struct device *f_dev, struct
>> device *dev)
>>   {
>> -       /* XXX warning we should watch out for name collisions */
>> -       strlcpy(f_dev->bus_id, dev->bus_id, BUS_ID_SIZE);
>> +       snprintf(f_dev->bus_id, BUS_ID_SIZE, "firmware-%s",
>> dev->bus_id);
>>  }
>>
>> Two programs are broken by this change: 
>>     1) dellBiosUpdate, which is part of libsmbios
>>     2) All of the Dell Update Packages (DUPs) that are part of Dell
>> OpenManage: each BIOS release for each of 3-4 dozen platforms.
>>
>> These programs are broken due to the pathname change from
>> /sys/class/firmware/dell_rbu/   to
>> /sys/class/firmware/firmware-dell_rbu/loading. 
>>
>> Realistically, I can fix libsmbios in a couple of weeks, but there is
>>     
> no
>   
>> way that we can go back and fix a couple hundred DUP packages for this
>> change. If this stays, we are looking at over 6 months before we have
>>     
> an
>   
>> officially-available Dell OpenManage that can deal with it, and that
>> would be for new BIOS releases only, I suspect.
>>
>> Some of the relevant threads from when this was submitted and
>>     
> accepted:
>   
>> http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/23/73
>> http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/23/62
>>
>> Due to the extremely large and disruptive nature of this bug, it would
>> be nice to get a 2.6.24.1 with this patch reverted.
>>
>> I have copied the relevant developers at Dell who maintain this
>>     
> driver.
>   
>> Please preserve the cc: list when replying.
>>     
>
> Fair enough, I have no problem reverting this.
>
> Anyone want to keep it in?
>
>   
Hi Greg,

reverting this breaks support for several media (DVB/V4L) devices. I 
would have to look up some bugreports the same name collision happened 
with several different drivers.
There was a comment in the fw code to watch out for name collisions 
earlier already, so it needs a fix somewhere.

Here's some history:
http://mcentral.de/wiki/index.php5/Bugtracker#i2c_dev_problem

Markus