Hardware error reporting [was Re: PCI Error reporting]

[linas@austin.ibm.com (Linas Vepstas)]

Hi John,

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 02:28:45PM +0100, johnflux@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
>  I am the maintainer of the KDE 'task manager' equivalent (kde system
> guard).  I was discussing with someone in the UK about telling the user
> about PCI bus errors.  The idea would be to inform the user that their
> soundcard etc is no longer working etc.

If the sound card is no longer working due to a PCI bus error, and 
the sound card device driver did not take appropriate steps to try
to recover from that error, then its a sound card device driver bug,
and should be treated as such.  

This is not limited to PCI errors; any kind of hardware error on 
the card needs to be auto-recovered by the driver. Both ethernet cards 
and SCSI cards do this as a matter of course. e.g. the e100/e1000
intel ethernet will print messages about "watchdog timeout" to
/var/log/syslog.  The scsi generic layer does an escalating progression 
of device resets, bus resets and host resets.  This is usualy
enough to cure just about any error. This should also be mostly
invisible to user-space: i.e. something burped, but was OK after 
that.

If a device driver has taken every step possible to recover, and 
still cannot, then it will ... I dunno. Good question.

>  From userspace, how can I get this sort of information?

I don't know that the Linux kernel has any standardized way to
report back to user-space that some device is permanently,
unrecoverably dead. Usually, there's a flurry of messages
to /var/log/syslog. I suppose this stuff should be reported 
somehow. 

Anyway, userspace gets messages from the kernel via "hald"
(hardware abstraction layer daemon) and the sbus(??)I forget
what its called, the system message bus. These two are plugged 
into the udev infrastructure.  I'm thinking one place to
ask/discuss this question is on the udev mailing list.

--linas

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