Re: [PATCH 07/15] MIPS: IP27: clean out sn/nmi.h

Jason A. Donenfeld
2022-10-27T12:51:27Z

Hi,

Thanks for working on this patchset. The magic-number.rst file has
always kind of bothered me with its outdated encouragements to magic up
every struct.

Technically, this series seems okay. It'd be nice if somebody had some
SGI hardware to figure out what NMI_MAGIC is all about, but that doesn't
need to block removing it from magic-number.rst, so that
magic-number.rst can be put to rest. Interestingly, though,
0x48414d4d455201 is "HAMMER\x01". The only reference to it I could find
on the Internet that wasn't this file itself was some forum on Intel
stuff? https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/intel-bare-metal-programming/msg1273587/#msg1273587
No idea.

Anyway, I suspect the actual issues that remain are mostly formalities,
as others have mentioned:

1) Add a 00/15 cover letter that explains your intentions, and make sure
the "right people" are CC'd on that. Hard to say who that might be,
given how diverse this patchset is. Maybe Andrew Morton? Or Kees
Cook? No idea.

2) Fix up your commit messages:

> The only user is arch/mips/sgi-ip27/ip27-nmi.c;
> this file was imported wholesale in 2.3.99pre9-1,
> and received only whitespace updates since then
>
> NMI_MAGIC isn't a magic number; it's unclear if it's actually used
> by the firmware in some capacity or if it's a holdover from copying
> the SGI code, but in the former case it's API
> and in the latter it's dead cruft
>
> Lack of QEMU support makes this unvalidatable without the hardware,
> so leave it in

Add some trailing periods, and reformat this to have the usual
alignment. `gq` in vim will do that for you. So for that message, it
should become:

| The only user is arch/mips/sgi-ip27/ip27-nmi.c; this file was imported
| wholesale in 2.3.99pre9-1, and received only whitespace updates since
| then.
|
| NMI_MAGIC isn't a magic number; it's unclear if it's actually used by
| the firmware in some capacity or if it's a holdover from copying the
| SGI code, but in the former case it's API and in the latter it's dead
| cruft.
|
| Lack of QEMU support makes this unvalidatable without the hardware, so
| leave it in.

3) Ensure the "From:" header of your email matches your Signed-off-by:
trailer.

4) Use "Link: " instead of "Ref: ", and make sure all of your tags are
*above* your Signed-off-by:, not below.

5) Figure out what your name actually is. If it's fake (as somebody
earlier suggested), either don't make it fake, or don't get caught
with it being fake in some obvious way, as the kernel supposedly
requires real names (George Spelvin notwithstanding). Probably (3) is
enough to take care of this though.

I realize this is likely annoying administrivia. Sorry. So it goes with
Linux stuff.

Jason