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authorStewart Smith <stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com>2014-02-28 11:58:32 +1100
committerBenjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>2014-03-07 16:19:00 +1100
commit774fea1a38c6a5a8ccc10969db84da24565f276f (patch)
tree42777c9092ff4010fd590afb3cad2b2c72976443 /Documentation/ABI/stable
parent60b962239a0837869be3e9192003fb8076068b91 (diff)
downloadlinux-774fea1a38c6a5a8ccc10969db84da24565f276f.tar.bz2
powerpc/powernv: Read OPAL error log and export it through sysfs
Based on a patch by: Mahesh Salgaonkar <mahesh@linux.vnet.ibm.com> This patch adds support to read error logs from OPAL and export them to userspace through a sysfs interface. We export each log entry as a directory in /sys/firmware/opal/elog/ Currently, OPAL will buffer up to 128 error log records, we don't need to have any knowledge of this limit on the Linux side as that is actually largely transparent to us. Each error log entry has the following files: id, type, acknowledge, raw. Currently we just export the raw binary error log in the 'raw' attribute. In a future patch, we may parse more of the error log to make it a bit easier for userspace (e.g. to be able to display a brief summary in petitboot without having to have a full parser). If we have >128 logs from OPAL, we'll only be notified of 128 until userspace starts acknowledging them. This limitation may be lifted in the future and with this patch, that should "just work" from the linux side. A userspace daemon should: - wait for error log entries using normal mechanisms (we announce creation) - read error log entry - save error log entry safely to disk - acknowledge the error log entry - rinse, repeat. On the Linux side, we read the error log when we're notified of it. This possibly isn't ideal as it would be better to only read them on-demand. However, this doesn't really work with current OPAL interface, so we read the error log immediately when notified at the moment. I've tested this pretty extensively and am rather confident that the linux side of things works rather well. There is currently an issue with the service processor side of things for >128 error logs though. Signed-off-by: Stewart Smith <stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
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+What: /sys/firmware/opal/elog
+Date: Feb 2014
+Contact: Stewart Smith <stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
+Description:
+ This directory exposes error log entries retrieved
+ through the OPAL firmware interface.
+
+ Each error log is identified by a unique ID and will
+ exist until explicitly acknowledged to firmware.
+
+ Each log entry has a directory in /sys/firmware/opal/elog.
+
+ Log entries may be purged by the service processor
+ before retrieved by firmware or retrieved/acknowledged by
+ Linux if there is no room for more log entries.
+
+ In the event that Linux has retrieved the log entries
+ but not explicitly acknowledged them to firmware and
+ the service processor needs more room for log entries,
+ the only remaining copy of a log message may be in
+ Linux.
+
+ Typically, a user space daemon will monitor for new
+ entries, read them out and acknowledge them.
+
+ The service processor may be able to store more log
+ entries than firmware can, so after you acknowledge
+ an event from Linux you may instantly get another one
+ from the queue that was generated some time in the past.
+
+ The raw log format is a binary format. We currently
+ do not parse this at all in kernel, leaving it up to
+ user space to solve the problem. In future, we may
+ do more parsing in kernel and add more files to make
+ it easier for simple user space processes to extract
+ more information.
+
+ For each log entry (directory), there are the following
+ files:
+
+ id: An ASCII representation of the ID of the
+ error log, in hex - e.g. "0x01".
+
+ type: An ASCII representation of the type id and
+ description of the type of error log.
+ Currently just "0x00 PEL" - platform error log.
+ In the future there may be additional types.
+
+ raw: A read-only binary file that can be read
+ to get the raw log entry. These are
+ <16kb, often just hundreds of bytes and
+ "average" 2kb.
+
+ acknowledge: Writing 'ack' to this file will acknowledge
+ the error log to firmware (and in turn
+ the service processor, if applicable).
+ Shortly after acknowledging it, the log
+ entry will be removed from sysfs.
+ Reading this file will list the supported
+ operations (curently just acknowledge). \ No newline at end of file