Re: [BUG] Linux kernel crash in amd_smn_init during PVH Dom0 boot on AMD EPYC

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 19.08.2026 09:09, Arthur Borsboom wrote:
>> Well, a pretty natural question: What amount of research have you done 
>> yourself?
> 
> Lovely response. You really know how to motivate people and welcome
> them into a community.
> 
> It has taken me about 1,5 day of work to find out why the screen
> remained black, to determine where the problem was, how to retrieve
> potential info by a serial-over-LAN console, subscribe to the mailing
> list, and create this bug report to help.
> 
> But don't worry, I won't do any debugging anymore for the Xen project,
> you have made sure of that. No need to respond.

Well, no, I can't really skip responding here. Yes, there was a risk that
you may take my reply as "not welcoming". Yet please can you try to see
both sides of the medal? From your initial report, which effectively
wasn't much more than the dumping of a log with the traces of a crash,
how could anyone have concluded how little or much work it was for you to
get there. As much as you have felt offended by my reply, I consider such
reports as an abuse as well: This is xen-devel@, not xen-users@, and I
think it is only fair for us to expect that reporters check whether their
problem was reported before, and whether therefore a fix already exists.

In fact, looking back - you did identify the earlier report. I clearly
scrolled down too quickly, and I'm sorry for that. The question then is,
though: What did you expect from re-reporting the issue to xen-devel@?
A patch for the issue is in flight, yet that patch to be taken is
nothing any of the Xen developers really have much control over: It's
not Xen interfacing code in Linux which is affected. So I continue to
have the feeling that this wasn't helpful at all, and my putting time
into finding the (apparently) most recent variant of the pending fix was
not valued / pointless, as I ended up offending you be a non-technical
aspect of my reply.

As a result I wonder: Would it have left you with better feelings if
your mail was left entirely unresponded to (as would end up reasonably
likely, according to my observations over many years)?

Jan