Re: [PATCH v2 1/6] arm64: cpufeature: Allow early detect of specific features

From: Suzuki K Poulose
Date: Mon Jan 22 2018 - 10:34:13 EST


On 22/01/18 15:23, Julien Thierry wrote:


On 22/01/18 15:13, Suzuki K Poulose wrote:
On 22/01/18 15:01, Julien Thierry wrote:


On 22/01/18 14:45, Suzuki K Poulose wrote:
On 22/01/18 12:21, Julien Thierry wrote:


On 22/01/18 12:05, Suzuki K Poulose wrote:
On 17/01/18 11:54, Julien Thierry wrote:
From: Daniel Thompson <daniel.thompson@xxxxxxxxxx>

Julien,

One potential problem with this is that we don't have a way
to make this work on a "theoretical" system with and without
GIC system reg interface. i.e, if we don't have the CONFIG
enabled for using ICC system regs for IRQ flags, the kernel
could still panic. I understand this is not a "normal" configuration
but, may be we could make the panic option based on whether
we actually use the system regs early enough ?


I see, however I'm not sure what happens in the GIC drivers if we have a CPU running with a GICv3 and other CPUs with something else... But of course this is not technically limited by the arm64 capabilities handling.

What behaviour would you be looking for? A way to prevent the CPU to be brought up instead of panicking?


If we have the CONFIG enabled for using system regs, we can continue
to panic the system. Otherwise, we should ignore the mismatch early,
as we don't use the system register access unless all boot time active
CPUs have it.


Hmmm, we use the CPUIF (if available) in the first CPU pretty much as soon as we re-enable interrupts in the GICv3 driver, which is way before the other CPUs are brought up.

Isn't this CPUIF access an alternative, patched only when CPUIF feature
enabled ? (which is done only after all the allowed SMP CPUs are brought up )

The GICv3 doesn't rely on the alternatives, most of the operations are done via the CPUIF (ack IRQ, eoi, send sgi, etc ...).

So once GICv3 has been successfully probed and interrupts enabled, CPUIF might get used by the GICv3 driver.


Aha, OK. I am sorry. I was thinking that the ARM64_HAS_SYSREG_GIC_CPUIF was used just for that.
In that case, I think you are not breaking any current behavior, so thats fine.


other CPUs get to die_early().

Really ? I thought only late CPUs are sent to die_early().

Hmmm, I might be wrong here but that was my understanding of the call to verify_local_cpu_features in verify_local_cpu_capabilities.


The verify_local_cpu_features() is invoked only if the CPU is brought up late from userspace,
after we have finalised the system wide capabilities.

Sorry for the noise.

Suzuki