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Re: [PATCH v2 2/4] smbus: Fix spd_data_generate() error API violation


From: BALATON Zoltan
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 2/4] smbus: Fix spd_data_generate() error API violation
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:30:07 +0200 (CEST)
User-agent: Alpine 2.22 (BSF 395 2020-01-19)

On Sat, 27 Jun 2020, Markus Armbruster wrote:
BALATON Zoltan <balaton@eik.bme.hu> writes:
On Wed, 22 Apr 2020, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
On Wed, 22 Apr 2020, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
On 4/22/20 4:27 PM, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
On Wed, 22 Apr 2020, Markus Armbruster wrote:
The Error ** argument must be NULL, &error_abort, &error_fatal, or a
pointer to a variable containing NULL.  Passing an argument of the
latter kind twice without clearing it in between is wrong: if the
first call sets an error, it no longer points to NULL for the second
call.

spd_data_generate() can pass @errp to error_setg() more than once when
it adjusts both memory size and type.  Harmless, because no caller
passes anything that needs adjusting.  Until the previous commit,
sam460ex passed types that needed adjusting, but not sizes.

spd_data_generate()'s contract is rather awkward:

   If everything's fine, return non-null and don't set an error.

   Else, if memory size or type need adjusting, return non-null and
   set an error describing the adjustment.

   Else, return null and set an error reporting why no data can be
   generated.

Its callers treat the error as a warning even when null is returned.
They don't create the "smbus-eeprom" device then.  Suspicious.

Since the previous commit, only "everything's fine" can actually
happen.  Drop the unused code and simplify the callers.  This gets rid
of the error API violation.

This leaves board code no chance to recover from values given by
user that won't fit without duplicating checks that this function
does. Also this will abort without giving meaningful errors if an
invalid value does get through and result in a crash which is not
used friendly. So I don't like this but if others think this is
acceptable maybe at least unit test should be adjusted to make
sure aborts cannot be triggered by user for values that are not
usually tested during development.

Agreed. Do you have an example (or more) to better show Markus this
code use? So we can add tests.

After Markus's patches probably nothing uses it any more but this
comes with the result that previously giving some random value such
as -m 100 did produce a working sam460ex machine after some warnings
but now it just thows back some errors to the user which may or may
not be helpful to them.

Personally I'd use a script to generate a dumb static array of all
possible sizes...

Maybe testing with the biggest valid value such as -m 2048 (that's
commonly used probably) and an invalid value such as -m 100 might be
enough. Testing all possible values might take too long and would
not test what happens with invalid values. Ideally those invalud
values should also work like before a0258e4afa but should at least
give a meaningful warning so the user can fix the command line
without too much head scratching. Actually that commit was from Igor
not from Marcus so sorry for attributing that to Marcus too, I
remembered wrong.

By the way you could argue that on real machine you cannot plug
certain combinations of memory modules so it's enough to model that
but I think QEMU does not have to be that strict and also support
configs that cannot happen on real hadware but would work. This
might be useful for example if you have some ammount of memory to
set aside for a VM on a host but that's not a size that exists in
memory modules on real hardware. This also works on pc machine in
qemu-system-i386 for example: it accepts -m 100 and does its best to
create a machine with such unrealistic size. The sam460ex did the
same (within SoC's limits) and before a0258e4afa -m 100 was fixed up
to 96 MB which is now not possible due to change in QEMU internal
APIs. This probably isn't important enough to worth the extra effort
to support but would have been nice to preserve.

Besides the above here's another use case of the fix ups that I wanted
to keep:

cover.1592315226.git.balaton@eik.bme.hu/b5f4598529a77f15f554c593e9be2d0ff9e5fab3.1592315226.git.balaton@eik.bme.hu/">https://patchew.org/QEMU/cover.1592315226.git.balaton@eik.bme.hu/b5f4598529a77f15f554c593e9be2d0ff9e5fab3.1592315226.git.balaton@eik.bme.hu/

This board normally uses OpenBIOS which gets RAM size from fw_cfg and
so works with whatever amount of RAM (also Linux booted with -kernel
probably does not care) so any -memory value is valid. However some
may want to also use original firmware ROM for compatibility which
detects RAM reading SPD eeproms (the i2c emulation needed for that is
not working yet but once that's fixed this will be the case). I want
to add smbus_eeproms for this but do not want to just abort for cases
where -memory given by user cannot be covered with SPD data. Instead a
warning and covering as much RAM as possible should be enough (the ROM
will detect less RAM than given with -m
but that's OK and better than just bailing out without a message
tripping an assert). But I don't want to replicate in board code the
calculation and checks the spd_data_generate() function does anyway
(that would just puzzle reviewers for every use of this functions).

Previously this was possible with my original spd_data_generate()
implementation. What's your suggestion to bring that functionality
back without breaking Error API? Maybe adding new parameters to tell
the spd_data_generate() which fixups are allowed?

Quick reply without having thought through the issues at all: I'm not

Does that mean you'll reply later with more detail or this is all you had to say about this? (Just to know if I should wait for another reply.)

opposed to you doing work to enable additional or even arbitrary memory
sizes where these actually work.  I'm first and foremost opposed to me
wasting time on "improving" code that is not used for anything.  That's
why I dumbed down spd_data_generate().

It was used by sam460ex until moving ram allocation to memdev broke it.

Secondly, I'm opposed to QEMU "correcting" user configuration.  I want
QEMU do exactly what it's told, and fail with a clear error message when
that is not possible.  The error message may include hints for the user
on how to correct the configuration.

I don't agree with that. It's already hard enough for non-expert users to figure out the needed command line switches, making that even harder by throwing back an error for everything that could work just not exactly specified is needlessly annoying them further. To the point of chasing them away from using QEMU. A lot of people prefer VMWare or VirtualBox for this reason and only try QEMU if there's no other way.

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan

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