Bug#1041143: Module for accelerometer lis3lv02d isn't loaded at start for Dell Mobile Precision M6700; is this right?

[AlMa]

Package: linux-image-6.1.0-10-amd64
Version: 6.1.37-1
Severity: wishlist

In the journal we find the following warning concerning an accelerometer
(the last line is orange):

…
Jul 15 03:35:14 AnonymizedMachneName kernel: i801_smbus 0000:00:1f.3:
SMBus using PCI interrupt
Jul 15 03:35:14 AnonymizedMachneName kernel: ACPI: bus type USB registered
Jul 15 03:35:14 AnonymizedMachneName kernel: ACPI: video: Video Device
[VID] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no)
Jul 15 03:35:14 AnonymizedMachneName kernel: i801_smbus 0000:00:1f.3:
Accelerometer lis3lv02d is present on SMBus but its address is unknown,
skipping registration
…

The machine is a Dell Mobile Precision M6700. BIOS is at its latest
available version A20. As the machine experiences high-level issues
later at boot (e.g., some services can't start), we wish to be sure
about the contribution of the issues warned about here. How much do we
have to worry? During boot, /sys/devices/platform does NOT have files
referring to lis3lv02d.

Trying to `modprobe -v lis3lv02d` succeeds and yields new

/sys/kernel/btf/lis3lv02d
/sys/module/lis3lv02d

Trying to `modprobe -v lis3lv02d_i2c` generates even more contents in /sys:

/sys/kernel/btf/lis3lv02d_i2c
/sys/bus/i2c/drivers/lis3lv02d_i2c
/sys/module/lis3lv02d_i2c
/sys/module/lis3lv02d_i2c/drivers/i2c:lis3lv02d_i2c
/sys/module/lis3lv02d/holders/lis3lv02d_i2c

So the kernel might be unaware of the accelerometer by default (which is
probably not ideal because, e.g., the we might wish to cut/reduce power
to, say, fans, when the laptop starts falling/vibrating (and therefore
also reduce the power consumption by various chips, e.g., reducing the
CPU frequency) and restore the settings after fall).

Moreover, the documentation on lis3lv02d present in
/usr/share/doc/linux-doc-6.1 talks about HP laptops with this
accelerometer. Here, we have a Dell laptop. So IF the driver is
correct for our accelerometer (how do we find this out with certainty?),
the documentation has to be adapted.

Gratefully,
AlMa

[Debian Bug Tracking System]

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and subject line Re: Debian's BTS is not for regular user questions
has caused the Debian Bug report #1041143,
regarding Module for accelerometer lis3lv02d isn't loaded at start for Dell Mobile Precision M6700; is this right?
to be marked as done.

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regarding ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 
 conflicts with OpRegion 
 . lpc_ich: Resource conflict(s) found affecting gpio_ich
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-
], which spans more than PCI Bus 0000:00 [mem 
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regarding wmi_bus wmi_bus-PNP0C14:00: WQBC data block query control method not found; ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x0000000000000428-0x000000000000042F conflicts with OpRegion 0x0000000000000400-0x000000000000047F (20220331/utaddress-203)
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[AlMa]

You filed *8* different 'bugs' which (almost?) all are about a Dell Mobile
Precision M6700 ... and not once did you say what actual problem you
experienced?!?

That's wrong.
Before I posted some (not all) of the bug reports, the Dell laptop
stopped booting properly rather early; the root cause is still unknown
(though an intermediate cause is finally resolved now, the bug report is
already closed). It took me a bit to get a working console, a mouse and
network going so as to simply be able to start debugging. Some other
machines I manage had (and still have) other, less severe symptoms,
e.g., Wayland and programs depending on Wayland (e.g., “foot”) failing
to start after Debian upgrade.

If your computer doesn't boot properly, you go one by one through every
suspicious message you find. The fact that some messages are shown as
warnings and others as errors is clearly meant to warn whoever reads
them (i.e., the admin) and make him/her concerned. By the definition of
the terms “warning” and “error”! If these messages shouldn't make the
admin concerned, well, then the journalctl shouldn't show these messages
as warnings (AFAIK, yellow) and errors (red according to `man
journalctl`). Please don't try to unload on me because of this mess;
I'm just an admin, and not even a developer.

Therefore, please restore the bug reports you closed.

Gratefully,

Alma

[AlMa]

You filed *8* different 'bugs' which (almost?) all are about a Dell Mobile
Precision M6700 ... and not once did you say what actual problem you
experienced?!?

That's wrong.
Before I posted some (not all) of the bug reports, the Dell laptop
stopped booting properly rather early; the root cause is still unknown
(though an intermediate cause is finally resolved now, the bug report is
already closed). It took me a bit to get a working console, a mouse and
network going so as to simply be able to start debugging. Some other
machines I manage had (and still have) other, less severe symptoms,
e.g., Wayland and programs depending on Wayland (e.g., “foot”) failing
to start after Debian upgrade.

If your computer doesn't boot properly, you go one by one through every
suspicious message you find. The fact that some messages are shown as
warnings and others as errors is clearly meant to warn whoever reads
them (i.e., the admin) and make him/her concerned. By the definition of
the terms “warning” and “error”! If these messages shouldn't make the
admin concerned, well, then the journalctl shouldn't show these messages
as warnings (AFAIK, yellow) and errors (red according to `man
journalctl`). Please don't try to unload on me because of this mess;
I'm just an admin, and not even a developer.

Therefore, please restore the bug reports you closed.

Gratefully,

Alma

[AlMa]

You filed *8* different 'bugs' which (almost?) all are about a Dell Mobile
Precision M6700 ... and not once did you say what actual problem you
experienced?!?

That's wrong (at least if you put it this straight).
Before I posted some (not all) of the bug reports, the Dell laptop
stopped booting properly rather early; the root cause is still unknown
(though an intermediate cause is finally resolved now, and the
corresponding bug report is already closed). It took me a bit to get a
working console, a mouse and network going so as to simply be able to
start debugging. Some other machines I manage had (and still have)
other, less severe symptoms, e.g., Wayland and programs depending on
Wayland (e.g., “foot”) failing to start after Debian upgrade.

If your computer doesn't boot properly, you go one by one through every
suspicious message you find. The fact that some messages are shown as
warnings and others as errors is clearly meant to warn whoever reads
them (i.e., the admin) and make him/her concerned. By the definition of
the terms “warning” and “error”! If these messages shouldn't make the
admin concerned, well, then the journalctl shouldn't show these messages
as warnings (AFAIK, yellow) and errors (red according to `man
journalctl`). Please don't try to unload on me because of this mess;
I'm just an admin, and not even a developer.

Therefore, please restore the bug reports you closed.

Gratefully,

Alma

[Ben Hutchings]

Post by AlMa

You filed *8* different 'bugs' which (almost?) all are about a Dell Mobile
Precision M6700 ... and not once did you say what actual problem you
experienced?!?

That's wrong.
Before I posted some (not all) of the bug reports, the Dell laptop
stopped booting properly rather early; the root cause is still unknown
(though an intermediate cause is finally resolved now, the bug report is
already closed). It took me a bit to get a working console, a mouse and
network going so as to simply be able to start debugging. Some other
machines I manage had (and still have) other, less severe symptoms,
e.g., Wayland and programs depending on Wayland (e.g., “foot”) failing
to start after Debian upgrade.
If your computer doesn't boot properly, you go one by one through every
suspicious message you find. The fact that some messages are shown as
warnings and others as errors is clearly meant to warn whoever reads
them (i.e., the admin) and make him/her concerned. By the definition of
the terms “warning” and “error”!

This is a rather naive understanding of how logging is done in
practice. The reality is that developers often don't know (and maybe
can't know) just how severe an odd condition may be in practice.

Post by AlMa
If these messages shouldn't make the
admin concerned, well, then the journalctl shouldn't show these messages
as warnings (AFAIK, yellow) and errors (red according to `man
journalctl`). Please don't try to unload on me because of this mess;
I'm just an admin, and not even a developer.
Therefore, please restore the bug reports you closed.

I agree with Diederik's closing these bug reports. We as kernel
maintainers have limited time and resources for investigating bugs, and
we are certainly not able to provide individual support for users and
administrators. Investigating warning messages one by one is not a
priority at all.

If there is still an actual problem on this machine (not just warning
messages), please open *1* bug report that describes the actual problem
and the log messages.

Ben.

[AlMa]

Post by Ben Hutchings
This is a rather naive understanding of how logging is done in
practice. The reality is that developers often don't know (and maybe
can't know) just how severe an odd condition may be in practice.

Unfortunately, neither do I. Though seemingly unrelated journal-visible
issues are quite often indeed independent, sometimes unexpected
interactions or common root causes occur.

Post by Ben Hutchings
If there is still an actual problem on this machine (not just warning
messages), please open *1* bug report that describes the actual problem
and the log messages.

If under *actual* you mean *user-disturbing* (“error, flaw or fault in
the design, development, or operation of computer software that causes
it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in
unintended ways”, a definition from Wikipedia), I've got none for the
kernel because the kernel is not visible (nor should it be visible) to
users directly. The only (sometimes reproducible) full lock-up (SysRq
doesn't seem to work) I saw myself, which might concern the kernel,
happened when epiphany-browser loads Google maps directly or embedded
into a different Web site; I plan to submit a bug report.

As for other high-level problems which are already posted, there are at
least two (and more are likely to come).

One of them, already resolved recently (though the root cause is still
unknown, the intermediate problem is gone) is #1041014. If I had to
state the *actual* problem there, it would have been „the machine
doesn't boot properly, the screen is black, the keyboard doesn't seem to
respond“; such a description would've probably been considered *actual*
but pretty useless to the maintainers. Even if it would have been
useful to you, then only in the sense that a failure to start a
graphical user interface should not prevent text logins from visibly
showing up on Ctrl + Alt + F1 … Ctrl + Alt + F6 and that error codes
(instead of "ERRNO" and "exit-code") from failed spawns by systemd
should be printed.

As another big problem on another machine, cf. #1040497. A next step in
debugging this could be looking at how /run/gdm3/custom.conf is created,
whether the logic in /lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules is correct, and
whether using X.Org (in Debian 12) instead of Wayland (in Debian 11) is
really justified on the particular machine
(https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/merge_requests/171#note_1403697
doesn't apply in my use case because the onboard graphics chip is
usually not connected to a monitor in my setup, except if the monitor
connected to the PCIe NVIDIA card happens to fail, which has not yet
happened). If this issue involves the kernel at all, then probably the
nouveau driver. The details of this issue are beyond my level of
expertise, so I'm unsure how much I can really do myself.

Gratefully,
Alma

[AlMa]

Post by Ben Hutchings
This is a rather naive understanding of how logging is done in
practice.  The reality is that developers often don't know (and maybe
can't know) just how severe an odd condition may be in practice.

Unfortunately, neither do I.  Though seemingly unrelated journal-visible
issues are quite often indeed independent, sometimes unexpected
interactions or common root causes occur.

Perhaps, there should be a category for tentative errors and/or
tentative warnings (i.e., with an unknown (or yet unknown) severity in
practice). E.g., dereferencing a zero pointer, or division by zero, or
garbled screen output, or the inability to read '/' as the root user,
etc. are almost always errors (except when you test error-handling
routes themselves; then a division by zero is not a bug but a must). If
you say that it is unknown how severe a message such as “ACPI Warning:
SystemIO range … conflicts with OpRegion … . lpc_ich: Resource
conflict(s) found affecting gpio_ich” really is, it should not be a
warning (especially, it should not warn the reader) but be a tentative
warning (i.e., it might warn the reader in the future or under
particular circumstances). The (new?) colors of the tentative errors
and warnings should be clearly stated in the manpages of journalctl.