[RFC] tty/serial/kgdboc: Add and wire up clear_irqs callback
Colin Cross
ccross at android.com
Tue Sep 11 23:42:46 EDT 2012
On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 8:32 PM, Anton Vorontsov
<anton.vorontsov at linaro.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 03:15:40PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
>> Anton Vorontsov <anton.vorontsov at linaro.org> wrote:
>> > This patch implements a new callback: clear_irqs. It is used for the
>>
>> This bit I still really don't like. I would like to know what the generic
>> IRQ folks thing about it and if Thomas Gleixner has any brilliant ideas
>> here. I don't think its a show stopper it would just be nice if there was
>> a better solution first.
>
> Yup, good idea, Cc'ing.
>
> Hello Thomas,
>
> We're dissussing a patch that adds a clear_irq callback into UART
> drivers. For convenience, the particular patch is inlined at the end of
> this email. The rationale and the background for the whole thing can be
> found here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2012/9/10/2
>
> So, just for visual clearness, and for the fun of it, here is some
> glorious ascii art of what we have:
>
> ,---NMI-|`````|
> UART_IRQ---INT_controller | CPU |
> `---IRQ-|,,,,,|
>
> Pretty much standard scheme. That is, on the interrupt controller level
> we can reroute any IRQ to NMI, and back in 2008 folks at Google found
> that rerouting the UART IRQ to NMI brings some really cool features: we
> can have a very reliable and powerful debugger pretty much on every
> embedded machine, and without loosing the UART/console port itself.
>
> So, it works like this:
>
> - At boot time, Linux arch/ code reroutes UART IRQ to NMI, we connect
> the port to the KGDBoC, and so forth...;
> - User starts typing on the serial port;
> - UART raises its IRQ line;
> - Through the controller, one of CPUs gets an NMI;
> - In NMI context, CPU reads a character from UART;
> - Then it checks if the character resulted into the special 'enter
> KGDB' magic sequence:
> - If yes, then the CPU invites other CPUs into the KGDB, and thus
> kernel enters the debugger;
> - If the character wasn't part of the magic command (or the sequence is
> yet incomplete), then CPU exits NMI and continues as normal.
>
> The "problem" is in the last step. If we exit NMI without making UART
> know that we're done with the interrupt, we will reenter the NMI
> immediately, even without any new characters from the UART.
The UART irq line should go low when you read the character out of the
receive buffer, or the polling rx function should clear the interrupt
for you. If you use a clear_irqs callback, you can drop characters if
one arrives between the last character buffer read and calling
clear_irqs.
> The obvious solution would be to "mask/reroute NMI at INT_controller
> level or queue serial port's IRQ routine from somewhere, e.g. a tasklet
> or software raised IRQ". Unfortunately, this means that we have to keep
> NMI disabled for this long:
>
> 1. We exit the NMI context with NMI source disabled/rerouted;
> 2. CPU continues to execute the kernel;
> 3. Kernel receives a timer interrupt, or software-raised interrupt, or
> UART IRQ, which was temporary rerouted back to normal interrupts;
> 4. It executes normal IRQ-entry, tracing, lots of other stuff,
> interrupt handlers, softirq handlers, and thus we clear the UART
> interrupt;
> 5. Once the UART is cleared, we reenable NMI (in the arch-code, we can
> do that in our do_IRQ());
>
> As you can see, with this solution the NMI debugger will be effectively
> disabled from 1. to 5., thus shall the hang happen in this sensitive
> code, we would no longer able to debug it.
>
> And this defeats the main purpose of the NMI debugger: we must keep NMI
> enabled all the time when we're not in the debugger, the NMI debugger
> is always available (unless the debugger crashed :-)
>
> That's why I came with the clear_irq callback in the serial drivers
> that we call from the NMI context, it's much simpler and keeps the
> debugger robust. So, personally I too can't think of any other
> plausible solution that would keep all the features intact.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Anton.
>
>
> - - - -
> [PATCH] tty/serial/kgdboc: Add and wire up clear_irqs callback
>
> This patch implements a new callback: clear_irqs. It is used for the
> cases when KDB-entry (e.g. NMI) and KDB IO (e.g. serial port) shares the
> same interrupt. To get the idea, let's take some real example (ARM
> machine): we have a serial port which interrupt is routed to an NMI, and
> the interrupt is used to enter KDB. Once there is some activity on the
> serial port, the CPU receives NMI exception, and we fall into KDB shell.
> So, it is our "debug console", and it is able to interrupt (and thus
> debug) even IRQ handlers themselves.
>
> When used that way, the interrupt never reaches serial driver's IRQ
> handler routine, which means that serial driver will not silence the
> interrupt. NMIs behaviour are quite arch-specific, and we can't assume
> that we can use them as ordinary IRQs, e.g. on some arches (like ARM) we
> can't handle data aborts, the behaviour is undefined then. So we can't
> just handle execution to serial driver's IRQ handler from the NMI
> context once we're done with KDB (plus this would defeat the debugger's
> purpose: we want the NMI handler be as simple as possible, so it will
> have less chances to hang).
>
> So, given that have to deal with it somehow, we have two options:
>
> 1. Implement something that clears the interrupt; 2. Implement a whole
> new concept of grabbing tty for exclusive KDB use, plus implement
> mask/unmask callbacks, i.e.:
> - Since consoles might use ttys w/o opending them, we would have to
> make kdb respect CON_ENABLED flag (maybe a good idea to do it
> anyway);
> - Add 'bool exclusive' argument to tty_find_polling_driver(), if set
> to 1, the function will refuse to return an already opened tty; and
> will use the flag in tty_reopen() to not allow multiple users
> (there are already checks for pty masters, which are "open once"
> ttys);
> - Once we got the tty exclusively, we would need to call some new
> uart->mask_all_but_rx_interrupts call before we want to use the
> port for NMI/KDB, and unmask_all_but_rx_interrupts after we're done
> with it.
>
> The second option is obviously more complex, needlessly so, and less
> generic. So I went with the first one: we just consume all the
> interrupts. The tty becomes silently unusable for the rest of the world
> when we use it with KDB; but once we reroute the serial IRQ source back
> from NMI to an ordinary IRQ (in KDB this can be done with 'disable_nmi'
> command), it will behave as normal.
>
> p.s. Since the callback is so far used only by polling users, we place
> it under the appropriate #ifdef.
>
> Signed-off-by: Anton Vorontsov <anton.vorontsov at linaro.org>
> ---
> drivers/tty/serial/kgdboc.c | 10 ++++++++++
> drivers/tty/serial/serial_core.c | 15 +++++++++++++++
> include/linux/kgdb.h | 1 +
> include/linux/serial_core.h | 1 +
> include/linux/tty_driver.h | 1 +
> 5 files changed, 28 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/drivers/tty/serial/kgdboc.c b/drivers/tty/serial/kgdboc.c
> index 2b42a01..0aa08c8 100644
> --- a/drivers/tty/serial/kgdboc.c
> +++ b/drivers/tty/serial/kgdboc.c
> @@ -227,6 +227,15 @@ static int kgdboc_get_char(void)
> kgdb_tty_line);
> }
>
> +static void kgdboc_clear_irqs(void)
> +{
> + if (!kgdb_tty_driver)
> + return;
> + if (kgdb_tty_driver->ops->clear_irqs)
> + kgdb_tty_driver->ops->clear_irqs(kgdb_tty_driver,
> + kgdb_tty_line);
> +}
> +
> static void kgdboc_put_char(u8 chr)
> {
> if (!kgdb_tty_driver)
> @@ -298,6 +307,7 @@ static struct kgdb_io kgdboc_io_ops = {
> .name = "kgdboc",
> .read_char = kgdboc_get_char,
> .write_char = kgdboc_put_char,
> + .clear_irqs = kgdboc_clear_irqs,
> .pre_exception = kgdboc_pre_exp_handler,
> .post_exception = kgdboc_post_exp_handler,
> };
> diff --git a/drivers/tty/serial/serial_core.c b/drivers/tty/serial/serial_core.c
> index dcb2d5a..93c36cb 100644
> --- a/drivers/tty/serial/serial_core.c
> +++ b/drivers/tty/serial/serial_core.c
> @@ -2187,6 +2187,20 @@ static void uart_poll_put_char(struct tty_driver *driver, int line, char ch)
> port = state->uart_port;
> port->ops->poll_put_char(port, ch);
> }
> +
> +static void uart_clear_irqs(struct tty_driver *driver, int line)
> +{
> + struct uart_driver *drv = driver->driver_state;
> + struct uart_state *state = drv->state + line;
> + struct uart_port *port;
> +
> + if (!state || !state->uart_port)
> + return;
> +
> + port = state->uart_port;
> + if (port->ops->clear_irqs)
> + port->ops->clear_irqs(port);
> +}
> #endif
>
> static const struct tty_operations uart_ops = {
> @@ -2219,6 +2233,7 @@ static const struct tty_operations uart_ops = {
> .poll_init = uart_poll_init,
> .poll_get_char = uart_poll_get_char,
> .poll_put_char = uart_poll_put_char,
> + .clear_irqs = uart_clear_irqs,
> #endif
> };
>
> diff --git a/include/linux/kgdb.h b/include/linux/kgdb.h
> index 3b111a6..1fd1cf0 100644
> --- a/include/linux/kgdb.h
> +++ b/include/linux/kgdb.h
> @@ -295,6 +295,7 @@ struct kgdb_io {
> const char *name;
> int (*read_char) (void);
> void (*write_char) (u8);
> + void (*clear_irqs) (void);
> void (*flush) (void);
> int (*init) (void);
> void (*pre_exception) (void);
> diff --git a/include/linux/serial_core.h b/include/linux/serial_core.h
> index 822c887..855fb6e 100644
> --- a/include/linux/serial_core.h
> +++ b/include/linux/serial_core.h
> @@ -277,6 +277,7 @@ struct uart_ops {
> int (*poll_init)(struct uart_port *);
> void (*poll_put_char)(struct uart_port *, unsigned char);
> int (*poll_get_char)(struct uart_port *);
> + void (*clear_irqs)(struct uart_port *);
> #endif
> };
>
> diff --git a/include/linux/tty_driver.h b/include/linux/tty_driver.h
> index dd976cf..42f8a87 100644
> --- a/include/linux/tty_driver.h
> +++ b/include/linux/tty_driver.h
> @@ -282,6 +282,7 @@ struct tty_operations {
> int (*poll_init)(struct tty_driver *driver, int line, char *options);
> int (*poll_get_char)(struct tty_driver *driver, int line);
> void (*poll_put_char)(struct tty_driver *driver, int line, char ch);
> + void (*clear_irqs)(struct tty_driver *driver, int line);
> #endif
> const struct file_operations *proc_fops;
> };
> --
> 1.7.11.5
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