radeon_dp_aux_transfer_native: 74 callbacks suppressed

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

commit 92c177b7947d9c889ea7b024871445015ea74221
Author: Lyude
Date:   Wed Feb 22 16:34:53 2017 -0500

    drm/radeon/dp_auxch: Ratelimit aux transfer debug messages

does more harm than good in my opinion. Since this commit, I see
several occurrences of the following message in my kernel log daily:

radeon_dp_aux_transfer_native: 74 callbacks suppressed

I never got to see the "callback" in question though, not even once, as
this is a debug message which is off by default. Before the change, I
would not get any such message in the kernel log (as I would expect
when everything works as intended.)

Does this debug message really have any practical value? If not, the
easiest solution would be to simply drop it:

--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/radeon_dp_auxch.c
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/radeon_dp_auxch.c
@@ -168,8 +168,10 @@ radeon_dp_aux_transfer_native(struct drm
 		goto done;
 	}
 	if (tmp & AUX_RX_ERROR_FLAGS) {
-		DRM_DEBUG_KMS_RATELIMITED("dp_aux_ch flags not zero: %08x\n",
-					  tmp);
+		/*
+		 * aux transfers always fail with non-zero status flags when
+		 * there's nothing connected on the port
+		 */
 		ret = -EIO;
 		goto done;
 	}

I can resend this as a formal patch if you agree with this solution.

The actual cause of the problem is that ___ratelimit() prints its
message at KERN_WARNING level regardless of the level of the message
being suppressed. This makes ratelimiting debug, info or notice
messages awkward. Looks like a design overlook to me, maybe it should
be fixed, but that's a much bigger and intrusive change than the
proposal above.

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support