[Skiboot] [PATCH v2 7/7] opal/hmi: Never trust a cow!

[Frederic Barrat]

Le 27/03/2019 à 03:15, Stewart Smith a écrit :
> Frederic Barrat <fbarrat at linux.ibm.com> writes:
>> With opencapi, it's fairly common to trigger HMIs during AFU
>> development on the FPGA, by not replying in time to an NPU command,
>> for example. So shift the blame reported by that cow to avoid crowding
>> my mailbox.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Frederic Barrat <fbarrat at linux.ibm.com>
>> ---
>> Changelog
>> v2: no change
> 
> I'm kind of tempted to bikeshed this a bit and say we should throw a
> different ASCII art animal for an error when we've configured the NPU
> for OpenCAPI. Part of the joy of the cow error has been being able to
> map "customer complains of cow error" immediately over to "send bug to
> NVIDIA".
> 
> Maybe we need a goat or a sheep? IS the theme for the NPU commonly
> milked animals?
> 
> Also, why is ASCII art licensing information so hazy and weird. I don't
> want to have to have a conversation with lawyers about some ascii art
> goat from a BBS in the mid 1980s...
> 
> Although maybe a Capybara is more of a CAPI related animal?


A capybara would obviously get my vote! The difficulty is that with 
witherspoon, there's no such thing as an opencapi NPU, it can be both 
opencapi and nvlink at the same time. On a HMI, it would require a long 
and painful analysis to find out the cause of the HMI to know what 
animal to display. I'm not aware of any cross-breeding between a cow and 
capybara.
With animals getting more and more attention, maybe it's time to 
introduce a new component to skiboot, core/animal.c, which would be a 
database of ascii art, we would feed it some data, and it would have 
some complicated heuristic to figure out the right animal.

   Fred


> I guess the reality is that it's currently an overloaded cow, and we
> probably don't need to have a misleading overloaded cow as OpenCAPI
> support comes in....
> 
> Maybe we need to raid what's in Cowsay :)
>