Re: Cpufreq for opteron

[Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>]

Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz> writes:

> Okay, but hopefully machines being sold in retail will have bug-free
> BIOSes?

That was a good one.

BIOS are _always_ buggy.

Especially on production boards, when someone far away butchered a BIOS
until it booted XP instead of knowing what he was doing.

> > I know the debug code is ugly ... but, I am expecting to need it. In the
> > next rev of the driver, when hardware is publicly for sale, we have some
> > degree of stability, etc ... then great. But, for now, releasing a driver
> > that has only been tested on prototype hardware ... and removing the
> > debug code. Ouch.
> 
> If we want the code to be in 2.6.X final, it is good to start pushing
> it _now_. And we can't reasonably expect linus to eat patch with
> _that_ much debugging.

I don't see the problem, as long as the debugging code is a bit cleaned
up (no ifdefs in the functions itself). Also we have precendence
in some other subsystem that come with extensive debugging code.
Code ugliness comes from other things, not debugging code.

I think Paul's point - anything dependent on the BIOS should have a
a lot of self diagnosis support because BIOS are usually buggy - makes
a lot of sense. Otherwise one will have to add printks again 
as needed, and that would be a waste of time.

-Andi