From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: linas@austin.ibm.com (Linas Vepstas) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:26:36 +0000 Subject: Hardware error reporting [was Re: PCI Error reporting] Message-Id: <20061003152636.GA4381@austin.ibm.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable To: linux-hotplug@vger.kernel.org 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=20 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. =20 This is not limited to PCI errors; any kind of hardware error on=20 the card needs to be auto-recovered by the driver. Both ethernet cards=20 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=20 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=20 that. If a device driver has taken every step possible to recover, and=20 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=20 somehow.=20 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=20 into the udev infrastructure. I'm thinking one place to ask/discuss this question is on the udev mailing list. --linas ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=3Djoin.php&p=3Dsourceforge&CID=DEVD= EV _______________________________________________ Linux-hotplug-devel mailing list http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net Linux-hotplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-hotplug-devel