Re: [PATCH v4 07/10] watchdog: wdt-uclass.c: handle all DM watchdogs in watchdog_reset()

Tom Rini
2021-08-12T16:21:10Z

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On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 04:21:29PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Tom,
>
> In message <20210812134833.GU858@bill-the-cat> you wrote:
> >
> > Alright, lets take a look at what kind of area of the code we're talking
> > about. uclass_get is a pretty fundamental thing. If that fails, your
> > system is on fire. Things are massively corrupt.
>
> Full agreement here.
>
> > So yes, return codes need to be checked and passed. But no, not every
> > single error path needs to print to the user along every part of an
> > error path either.
>
> So if "the system is on fire" is one of the cases where an error
> message should be omitted to save maybe 50 or 100 bytes of image
> size? This sounds wrong to me.

It sounds right to me because it's unlikely everything caught fire
because of this call right here and likely it's because of one of the
messages much further up on the console log. Hopefully we haven't
caused that message to be unavailable now due to unhelpful failure
messages.

A log message needs to have value to it above and beyond boiling down to
"%s: %d", __func__, __LINE__ having been reached. This, right here, is
not a log message that matters. With DM we've made a great deal of
progress in being able to populate meaningful errors back up to our
callers rather than -1 for everything. So yes, in sum, these functions
need to return a value. The BSP ought to care (in the next patch), even
if it doesn't today when it could. But that's on the BSP author as they
know better than you or I what that system is being used for.

--
Tom

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