Comment 29 for bug 1118447

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 06:47:03PM -0000, Christopher M. Penalver wrote:

> Steve Langasek, thank you for your comment. While it is always appreciated
> when a developer steps in and advises to a bug report, a portion of your
> comments don't make sense (which I'm happy to take off report, but they
> are relevant here). Regarding your comments:

> >"This bug very clearly has nothing at all to do with the BIOS."

> This wouldn't be clear to everyone, and just saying so doesn't clear
> this up for folks.

It wouldn't be clear to everyone, but it *should* be clear to anyone who's
involved in triaging kernel bug reports. If you're going to be asking bug
submitters to take time to test with a newer BIOS, you should have a very
good reason for it; otherwise you're wasting the valuable resource of our
bug submitters' time, and filling the bug report with irrelevancies that
do nothing to help fix the user's issue or improve Ubuntu.

And in some cases, causing bugs to expire out of the system for invalid
reasons.

>> "Christopher, it is inappropriate to ask bug submitters to test with a
>> new BIOS for bugs like this - the BIOS is entirely unrelated to the
>> network filesystem layer,..."

> Ok, but the BIOS does have a hand in a well functioning system, of which
> the network filesystem layer depends on. No?

No. The network filesystem layer *is unrelated to the BIOS*.

And if you don't know this, you should not be following up to bugs asking
users to do tests with a newer BIOS.

Almost none of what the kernel does depends on the BIOS. There are only a
few exceptions: suspend/resume support, power management, some aspects of
video setup, hotkeys. Outside of this, the kernel is directly responsible
for the hardware, and any bugs are kernel bugs, not BIOS bugs.

>> "...if upgrading the BIOS did have any effect, it would be *irrelevant*
>> to the bug at hand."

> Wouldn't the updated BIOS having a positive affect, be the exact reason
> why one would want to update, in order to eliminating collateral damage
> from a buggy BIOS?

No. Any effect here is *not* because the BIOS is buggy, it's because modern
kernels and firmware are complex and changing the BIOS could
*coincidentally* work around this bug for one user. But it doesn't fix the
bug, and doesn't help other users who are experiencing this bug.