Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v6 1/4] arm: introduce psci_smp_ops

[Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 19 Apr 2013, Stefano Stabellini wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > 
> > > On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > > > > > This should allow the Xen problem to be resolved, because Xen will
> > > > > > provide the PSCI operations, and it's correct in that case to 
> > > > > > override
> > > > > > the platform's SMP operations.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Yes, increasing the priority of PSCI helps Xen a lot.
> > > > > In order to completely solve the issue for Xen though, another patch 
> > > > > is
> > > > > needed (http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=136630106201968&w=2) 
> > > > > because
> > > > > of the introduction of smp_init.
> > > > 
> > > > Please look at the latest smp_init patch version I sent to you.  It 
> > > > shouldn't conflict with Xen any longer.  It now returns a bool result 
> > > > depending on whether it did set up smp_ops or not.
> > > 
> > > CPUs are virtualized by Xen and do not reflect or expose the underlying
> > > SMP hardware and firmware features, so an hardware specific smp_init
> > > cannot run.
> > > 
> > > So the smp_init patch still breaks Xen because even if smp_init can fail
> > > graciously, executing a platform specific smp_init function that tries
> > > to access registers and memory regions that are not present is going to
> > > cause an undefined behaviour.
> > 
> > It won't access hardware but just look into the DT and return false if 
> > nothing interesting is found.  At which point the next attempt in the 
> > priority list is PSCI by default.
> 
> OK, that should work.
> I am going to drop "xen/arm: introduce xen_early_init, use PSCI on xen".
> 
> We'll have to be careful enforcing that future smp_init implementations
> use DT rather than probing registers. Maybe I should add a comment to
> the smp_init patch to clarify that?

No one should be probing registers without making sure it is safe to do 
so.  Even on non virtualized hardware this can be a dangerous thing to 
do.


Nicolas

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