Thu, May 21, 2020 at 11:51:13PM CEST, kuba@kernel.org wrote:

On Thu, 21 May 2020 13:59:32 -0700 Jacob Keller wrote:

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So the ice firmware can optionally send diagnostic debug messages via
its control queue. The current solutions we've used internally
essentially hex-dump the binary contents to the kernel log, and then
these get scraped and converted into a useful format for human consumption.

I'm not 100% of the format, but I know it's based on a decoding file
that is specific to a given firmware image, and thus attempting to tie
this into the driver is problematic.  

You explained how it works, but not why it's needed :)  

Well, the reason we want it is to be able to read the debug/diagnostics
data in order to debug issues that might be related to firmware or
software mis-use of firmware interfaces.

By having it be a separate interface rather than trying to scrape from
the kernel message buffer, it becomes something we can have as a
possibility for debugging in the field.

For pure debug/tracing perhaps trace_devlink_hwerr() is the right fit?

Well, trace_devlink_hwerr() is for simple errors that are mapped 1:1
with some string. From what I got, Jacob needs to pass some data
structures to the user. Something more similar to health reporter dumps
and their fmsg.