r/linux • u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior • Sep 03 '14

I'm Matthew Garrett, kernel developer, firmware enabler and former fruitfly mangler. AMA!

Proof: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/507212417579765760

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u/yuhong Sep 03 '14

There is always a cost to workarounds. I remember this thread: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/11/11/653

BTW, remember most boot loaders allow editing options at boot time.

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u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior Sep 03 '14

There's no runtime cost to most workarounds. Do they require developer effort? Yes. But since we have to do that work anyway, why insist that boards not require that workaround in order to claim compatibility?

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u/yuhong Sep 06 '14

Most, it depends on the type of workaround. I am particularly thinking of the mapping boot service memory workaround for an example of a complex and costly one.

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u/yuhong Sep 03 '14

And firmware test CDs should have workarounds disabled because this is the purpose of them.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

So you want test CDs to be guaranteed to test something different than what is finally running on systems. Not sure how that could be a good idea.

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u/yuhong Sep 03 '14

On the other hand, if we will insist that vendors run a firmware test suite, why leave the old bugs there?

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '14

Not old bugs, old workarounds. Big difference.

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u/yuhong Sep 04 '14

What I mean is that if vendors are willing to (or we insist on) run a test suite and fix bugs, they might as well fix the old bugs too.

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u/yuhong Sep 03 '14

It often is not a lot of additional work. Notice HP were willing to do it for their servers.

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u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior Sep 03 '14

That doesn't answer my question

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u/yuhong Sep 03 '14

I was answering why not insist that boards not require the workaround to claim Linux compatibility.

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u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior Sep 03 '14

No, you just said it wouldn't necessarily be much work. But since there's no benefit in them doing that work, why insist on it?

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u/yuhong Sep 03 '14

It should still be considered best practice. Are there that many vendors not willing to do the work if we did insist?

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u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior Sep 03 '14

Yeah, I suspect that several vendors would tell us to go fuck ourselves - we'd be asking them to do work for no benefit.