kernel 6.2 stuck at boot (efi_call_rts) on arm64

From: Andrea Righi
Date: Thu Mar 16 2023 - 03:55:14 EST


Hello,

the latest v6.2.6 kernel fails to boot on some arm64 systems, the kernel
gets stuck and never completes the boot. On the console I see this:

[ 72.043484] rcu: INFO: rcu_preempt detected stalls on CPUs/tasks:
[ 72.049571] rcu: 22-...0: (30 GPs behind) idle=b10c/1/0x4000000000000000 softirq=164/164 fqs=6443
[ 72.058520] (detected by 28, t=15005 jiffies, g=449, q=174 ncpus=32)
[ 72.064949] Task dump for CPU 22:
[ 72.068251] task:kworker/u64:5 state:R running task stack:0 pid:447 ppid:2 flags:0x0000000a
[ 72.078156] Workqueue: efi_rts_wq efi_call_rts
[ 72.082595] Call trace:
[ 72.085029] __switch_to+0xbc/0x100
[ 72.088508] 0xffff80000fe83d4c

After that, as a consequence, I start to get a lot of hung task timeout traces.

I tried to bisect the problem and I found that the offending commit is
this one:

e7b813b32a42 ("efi: random: refresh non-volatile random seed when RNG is initialized")

I've reverted this commit for now and everything works just fine, but I
was wondering if the problem could be caused by a lack of entropy on
these arm64 boxes or something else.

Any suggestion? Let me know if you want me to do any specific test.

Thanks,
-Andrea