Re: [RFC 1/2] devlink: add simple fw crash helpers

[Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>]

On 05/25/2020 02:07 AM, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 04:23:55PM -0700, Steve deRosier wrote:
>> On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 2:51 PM Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org> wrote:
>
>> I had to go RTFM re: kernel taints because it has been a very long
>> time since I looked at them. It had always seemed to me that most were
>> caused by "kernel-unfriendly" user actions.  The most famous of course
>> is loading proprietary modules, out-of-tree modules, forced module
>> loads, etc...  Honestly, I had forgotten the large variety of uses of
>> the taint flags. For anyone who hasn't looked at taints recently, I
>> recommend: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/tainted-kernels.html
>>
>> In light of this I don't object to setting a taint on this anymore.
>> I'm a little uneasy, but I've softened on it now, and now I feel it
>> depends on implementation.
>>
>> Specifically, I don't think we should set a taint flag when a driver
>> easily handles a routine firmware crash and is confident that things
>> have come up just fine again. In other words, triggering the taint in
>> every driver module where it spits out a log comment that it had a
>> firmware crash and had to recover seems too much. Sure, firmware
>> shouldn't crash, sure it should be open source so we can fix it,
>> whatever...
>
> While it may sound idealistic the firmware for the end-user, and even for mere
> kernel developer like me, is a complete blackbox which has more access than
> root user in the kernel. We have tons of firmwares and each of them potentially
> dangerous beast. As a user I really care about my data and privacy (hacker can
> oops a firmware in order to set a specific vector attack). So, tainting kernel
> is _a least_ we can do there, the strict rules would be to reboot immediately.
>
>> those sort of wishful comments simply ignore reality and
>> our ability to affect effective change.
>
> We can encourage users not to buy cheap crap for the starter.

There is no stable wifi firmware for any price.

There is also no obvious feedback from even name-brand NICs like ath10k or AX200
when you report a crash.

That said, at least in my experience with ath10k-ct, the OS normally recovers fine
from firmware crashes.  ath10k already reports full crash reports on udev, so
easy for user-space to notice and report bug reports upstream if it cares to.  Probably
other NICs do the same, and if not, they certainly could.

Thanks,
Ben


-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com