[PATCH 19/19] Documentation: ACPI for ARM64

[Christoffer Dall]

On 30 July 2014 08:47, Hanjun Guo <hanjun.guo at linaro.org> wrote:
> On 2014-7-29 21:31, Christoffer Dall wrote:
>> On 29 July 2014 15:08, Mark Rutland <mark.rutland at arm.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 01:52:40PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday 29 July 2014 14:37:38 Christoffer Dall wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> For reference, Red Hat's current arguing point for ACPI in VMs is
>>>>> hotplug of things like CPUs and memory for very large VMs, but I
>>>>> haven't thought too carefully about this just yet, as I don't have a
>>>>> 100+ core ARM 64-bit hardware lying around...
>>>>
>>>> I thought you could run guests with more virtual CPUs that you have
>>>> physical CPUs on the host.
>>>>
>>>> Regarding CPU and memory hotplug, don't we already have PSCI and
>>>> xen-balloon/virtio-balloon for that?
>>>
>>> PSCI (0.1) was there for guests from the start, and ACPI doesn't do
>>> anything different w.r.t. PSCI other than requiring PSCI 0.2 (which can
>>> be used by guests supporting only PSCI 0.1). So there's no magic for
>>> CPU hotplug provided by ACPI.
>>
>> With PSCI you can only provide your VM a bunch of CPUs and say that
>> they're all turned off, and then turn some of them on later.
>
> Yes, agreed.
>
>> I honestly don't know if you can do proper CPU hotplug with ACPI, but
>> the RH guys seem to argue that you can.  Again, I didn't think too
>> carefully about this.
>
> Yes, we can do proper CPU hotplug with ACPI based physical hotplug (named
> dynamic device configuration in ACPI spec), you can refer to section 6.3
> "Device Insertion, Removal, and Status Objects" in ACPI 5.1.
>
> There are mechanisms for handling dynamic insertion and removal of devices
> and for determining device and notification processing status. When removing
> a processor,
>
> a) we will call PSCI or similar interface to offline a CPU from OS, then
>    OS will not use it any more;
>
> b) call ACPI API to trim the resources that allocated during device
>    enumeration;
>
> c) Call ACPI method _EJ0 and then will notify firmware or hypervisor device
>    will be removed, jump to firmware or hypervisor to remove the device
>    from that level;

When you say notify hypervisor, would we really need a
hypervisor-specific interface if you're running UEFI as your firmware?
 Can you not just call whatever UEFI service to remove a CPU and let
that UEFI implementation deal with the hypervisor/hardware interface?

-Christoffer