Return-path: Received: from mail-vc0-f176.google.com ([209.85.220.176]:61076 "EHLO mail-vc0-f176.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755064AbaHNPvP (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Aug 2014 11:51:15 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <53ECD8D0.4050709@lwfinger.net> References: <53ECD8D0.4050709@lwfinger.net> Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 09:51:14 -0600 Message-ID: (sfid-20140814_175122_497241_7A55B4F7) Subject: Re: Intel wireless microcode problem.. From: Linus Torvalds To: Larry Finger Cc: Johannes Berg , Emmanuel Grumbach , Intel Linux Wireless , "John W. Linville" , Linux Wireless List , Network Development Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 9:42 AM, Larry Finger wrote: > > There is a new firmware that seems to help the problem. You can get it from > Emmanuel's git clone. As he wrote earlier So quite frankly, this is *not* acceptable. We have regression policies for the kernel, and this seems to be a kernel regression with the currently released firmware. And I'm not downloading experimental firmware while traveling with this laptop being my only way to work. The warnings cause *so* much message log spam that the machine is occasionally spending 5% of CPU time on systemd journaling, and presumably filling up disk space too. And the same way we don't tell people "update your buggy user space" when we introduce kernel regressions, we don't tell people "try a new firmware". People who have old systems (old distributions, old firmware, old hardware, old *anything*) that works with their previous kernel, are supposed to be able to upgrade their kernel with no regressions. That's the rules for the kernel, and that's what the rules have been for a long time. Kernel developers - including wireless driver writers - had better understand that rule. It's the absolute #1 rule when it comes to kernel development. This is not something new and surprosing. The insane amount of logging needs to be fixed. The wireless *works*, but the logging is too verbose. Now, maybe this isn't actually a kernel regression at all - maybe triggered by the horrid internet I have while traveling - but I tried twice, and when I booted into the regular Fedora kernel for testing (oh, just noticed that it's 3.15.8, not 3.16-based), I didn't see this kind of log spamming. So it looks like a regression to me, and we have rules about regressions. And they are just about the ONLY hard rules we have. But that regression rule really is very very important indeed. The wireless *works* with the current firmware, so all that is required is to make sure that the kernel stops spamming the logs so heavily. It would obviously be better to try to figure out *why* the microcode error happens, and what changed in the kernel to trigger it, but the "don't make the machine have trouble with the insane amount of logs" is at least an acceptable workaround. Ok? Linus