Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/8] Nvram-to-pstore

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2013 14:43:31 +1000

On Sat, 2013-06-01 at 14:40 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

  .../...

> In fact, this applies to at least all the BookS server platforms...
> 
> Things that come to mind:
> 
>  - nvram_64.c duplicates generic_nvram.c as far as the user accessors
> are concerned, it should be possible to get rid of code there. Either
> the arch or the generic one (*)
> 
>  - The nvram partition management should move to generic. While at it
> factor in the powermac variant (same stuff, mostly duplicated code)
> 
>  - powernv wants all the goodies that pseries has, as does cell.

 - It's stupid for userspace to re-implement the whole partition scheme,
so let's add ioctl's to lookup partitions by name & type. We could turn
the whole thing into sysfs instead too which might be better .... (ie
a file per partition).

> (*) I wonder about that generic stuff... userspace might want to start
> doing things like resizing the common partition if not big enough etc...
> For that we might want to add more specific ioctl's. Is anybody other
> than us using generic_nvram ? I don't like adding ioctl's like that
> to a generic driver, maybe we could just make it call into something
> like arch_nvram_ioctl() and have an empty weak variant instead of the
> current ifdef game.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ben.
> 
> > Changes from v2:
> > 	- Fix renaming of pstore type ids in nvram.c
> > 
> > Changes from v1:
> > 	- Reduce #ifdefs by and remove forward declarations of pstore callbacks
> > 	- Handle return value of nvram_write_os_partition
> > 	- Remove empty pstore callbacks and register pstore only when pstore
> > 	  is configured
> > ---
> > 
> > Aruna Balakrishnaiah (8):
> >       powerpc/pseries: Remove syslog prefix in uncompressed oops text
> >       powerpc/pseries: Add version and timestamp to oops header
> >       powerpc/pseries: Introduce generic read function to read nvram-partitions
> >       powerpc/pseries: Read/Write oops nvram partition via pstore
> >       powerpc/pseries: Read rtas partition via pstore
> >       powerpc/pseries: Distinguish between a os-partition and non-os partition
> >       powerpc/pseries: Read of-config partition via pstore
> >       powerpc/pseries: Read common partition via pstore
> > 
> > 
> >  arch/powerpc/platforms/pseries/nvram.c |  353 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----
> >  fs/pstore/inode.c                      |    9 +
> >  include/linux/pstore.h                 |    4 
> >  3 files changed, 313 insertions(+), 53 deletions(-)
> > 
>