Re: [PATCH] firmware: Be a bit more verbose about direct firmware loading failure

[Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 03:46:30PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Sep 2013, Neil Horman wrote:
> > Both of these execptions should be rare, and are something the administrator
> > will want to know about, so as not to confuse the real error with the mystery
> > -ENOENT you would get if you fell back to the user mode helepr and it wansn't
> > configured on in the running kernel.
> 
> Except, of course, for Intel processor microcode updates, which are going to
> cause ENOENT on a large number of systems.
> 
> This will generate a large number of questions by users on the distro MLs.
> 
> However, IMHO this is *not* a reason to refuse this patch series.  If
> anything, at least for Debian I will use it as an opportunity to educate
> people about the existence of microcode update packages in "non-free".
> 
I agree. If people are running with downlevel microcode, they shold know about
it.  You can't expect request_firmware to fail silently.  If people complain, I
think the right solution would be to add a test to the microcode_request_fw
function to check for the existence of the file before requesting it.

Neil

> -- 
>   "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
>   them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
>   where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
>   Henrique Holschuh
>