[RFC PATCH 2/2] ARM: SMP support for mach-virt

[Rob Herring]

On 12/04/2012 11:16 AM, Will Deacon wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 04:45:58PM +0000, Rob Herring wrote:
>> On 12/04/2012 10:11 AM, Will Deacon wrote:
>>> On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 02:37:25PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
>>>> Umm.  So let's see.  If I'm running v3.6 stock kernel and want to kexec
>>>> into a v3.7 stock kernel.  The SMP pen is part of the v3.6 kernel, which
>>>> will be located at 32K into the RAM.  The v3.7 kernel will also want to
>>>> occupy the same place.  At some point you have to overwrite the v3.6
>>>> kernel with the v3.7 kernel image.
>>>
>>> If the 3.6 kernel didn't bring those CPUs online, they will sit in the
>>> bootloader pen (out of the way of the kernel image) rather than the kernel
>>> pen so I don't think there will be a problem.
>>>
>>> The problem you're describing actually happens when the 3.6 kernel onlines
>>> all of the CPUs, because now it has no way to hotplug them off safely. This
>>> is also an issue with non-virtualised hardware but we could solve it for the
>>> virtual platform by having a para-virtualised device for doing CPU hotplug.
>>>
>>>> That happens _before_ the DT has been parsed, so any memreserve stuff
>>>> will be ignored.  And it's at that point that your "offline" secondary
>>>> CPUs will have their instructions overwritten.
>>>>
>>>> That's fine if the pen ends up being at the same place but that's not
>>>> something we guarantee.
>>>
>>> Having CPUs in limbo between the bootloader the being online in the kernel
>>> is something we should just avoid. Isn't that pen __init anyway?
>>
>> Aren't we mixing 2 pens here? You must have some simple bootloader
>> containing vector table and a pen that the dtb points to, right? The pen
>> you have in the kernel is only needed when hotplug only does a wfi. As
>> you don't yet support hotplug, then you can drop all the kernel pen code.
> 
> Yes, both qemu and kvmtool have bootloader pens outside of the kernel but
> since wfi is not trapped by kvm, the secondaries can be released early due
> to a spurious wakeup so we need the second pen.

Wouldn't the pen requiring both a valid address (perhaps !0 or !-1) and
a wake-up fix this?

Rob