Re: [PATCH] Use BIOS reboot on Toshiba Portege 4000

From: Eduardo Habkost
Date: Tue Nov 04 2008 - 06:58:41 EST


On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 03:22:30AM -0800, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Avi Kivity <avi@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> >> I think we are confusing two issues here.
> >>
> >> - Ordinary machine_restart which happens to call emergency_restart.
> >> And is proceeded by machine_shutdown.
> >>
> >> - And emergency_restart itself.
> >>
> >> To some extent I would be a lot happier if Alt-sysrq-r did what
> >> was necessary to get into a context where it can call machine_restart
> >> or even better kernel_restart().
> >> emergency_restart() is a nice idea but is broken by design.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > Isn't emergency_restart() equivalent to kexec()? Both start from indeterminite
> > conditions.
>
> Good point. That is a reasonable direction to evolve it on x86.
> Similar to and sharing some of the same code as the kexec on panic path.
>
> We may need to separate out emergency_restart from the normal clean
> restart to make that happen. It would be pointless and silly to be
> sending NMI at other cpus for example if we have cleanly shut them
> down already.

When pulling the NMI stuff to the reboot code, I've just hit this issue:
currently, machine_ops.emergency_restart has two possible semantics:

- The function that should be called to immediately reboot the machine,
after the cleanup done by machine_restart()
- The function that should be called to reboot the machine when we are
on a possibly inconsistent state (and will do the vmx-disabling
stuff)

Currently we don't do anything special on emergency_restart() case,
so both cases are equivalent. But now we will need to differentiate
both cases.


...all this work because VMX breaks the good old reset lines. :\

--
Eduardo
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