Re: [NAK] Re: [PATCH -v2 9/9] ACPI, APEI, Generic Hardware Error Source POLL/IRQ/NMI notification type support

Ingo Molnar
2010-10-26T07:22:42Z

* Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> wrote:

> >From Kconfig:
>
> EDAC is designed to report errors in the core system.
> These are low-level errors that are reported in the CPU or
> supporting chipset or other subsystems:
> memory errors, cache errors, PCI errors, thermal throttling, etc..
> If unsure, select 'Y'.
>
> So please explain why your error reporting is so different from the above that it
> justifies a separate facility. And you better come up with a real good explanation
> other than we looked at EDAC and it did not fit our needs.

Btw., it's not just about EDAC - the firmware can store Linux events persistently
(beyond allowing the firmware to insert its own RAS events), that is obviously
_hugely_ useful for kernel debugging in general. We could inject debugging events
there and recover them after a crash, etc.

As long as it's all integrated into the standard event logging facilities it could
be very useful (and i dont generally complain about things that are insignificant).

As /dev/erst-dbg it's not useful at all - in fact it might close the door to sane
future usage of this hw facility if some crappy user-space learns to rely on the
/dev/erst-dbg ABI.

Thanks,

Ingo