Re: [PATCH] x86/efi-bgrt: Switch all pr_err() to pr_debug() for invalid BGRT

Colin Ian King
2016-04-30T22:42:47Z

On 30/04/16 23:35, Matt Fleming wrote:
> (Adding Colin and Ricardo)
>
> On Wed, 27 Apr, at 01:23:55PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
>>
>> How is an end user supposed to see such a message and report it to the
>> people that can fix it? They can't. So they report it in their
>> distributions bug tracker and it either gets closed as "yeah, firmware
>> sucks" or it sits there and rots in the hope that some day someone
>> will do something.
>>
>> I understand where you're coming from in a pre-production, development
>> environment but to be quite clear that is not the default environment
>> Linux is run in most of the time. If this were a kernel warning, that
>> could be fixed with a kernel patch, then maybe it would be worth it.
>> It isn't though.
>
> If the error messages in the BGRT driver make it impossible for end
> users to achieve a pretty boot experience then I agree, that is a
> kernel bug. BGRT is an exception to the usual rule about complaining
> loudly when we encounter firmware bugs simply because we're dealing
> with UIs in this case.
>
> That's not to say we should give up reporting these kinds of invalid
> table issues to firmware developers altogether. There are other means
> of doing it, and comprising the wants of many end users for the
> benefit of few firmware developers (relatively) is just not sensible.
>
> Colin, Ricardo, I haven't checked recently, are there ACPI BGRT
> validations tests in FWTS and LUV? Josh (Triplett), BITS would seem
> like a very good place to include these tests since it already has a
> bunch of ACPI table checks.
>
fwts does have a BGRT test, although it is fairly trivial:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/hwe/fwts.git/tree/src/acpi/bgrt/bgrt.c

Colin