[PATCH v7 04/17] ARM64 / ACPI: Introduce early_param for "acpi" and pass acpi=force to enable ACPI

[Stefano Stabellini]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2015, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 07:20:06PM +0000, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > On Tue, 20 Jan 2015, Hanjun Guo wrote:
> > > How about the patch (just RFC, maybe it is horrible :) ) below:
> > > 
> > > When system supporting both DT and ACPI but firmware providing
> > > no dtb, we can use this linux,uefi-stub-generated-dtb property
> > > to let kernel know that we can try ACPI configuration data.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Hanjun Guo <hanjun.guo at linaro.org>
> > > ---
> > >  Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt | 19 ++++++++++++++++
> > >  arch/arm64/kernel/setup.c                    | 34
> > > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
> > >  drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/fdt.c           |  6 +++++
> > >  3 files changed, 58 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> > > 
> > > diff --git a/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt
> > > b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt
> > > index ed838f4..18776b9 100644
> > > --- a/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt
> > > +++ b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt
> > > @@ -44,3 +44,22 @@ Implementation note: Linux will look for the property
> > > "linux,stdout-path" or
> > >  on PowerPC "stdout" if "stdout-path" is not found.  However, the
> > >  "linux,stdout-path" and "stdout" properties are deprecated. New platforms
> > >  should only use the "stdout-path" property.
> > > +
> > > +
> > > +linux,uefi-stub-generated-dtb property
> > > +--------------------------------------
> > > +
> > > +UEFI stub will generate this property in the chosen node to let linux kernel
> > > +know that there is no DTB provided by firmware.
> > > +
> > > +There is a use case for system supporting both DT and ACPI, when firmware
> > > +doesn't provide DT, we can try ACPI configration data to boot the system.
> > > +
> > > +Usage:
> > > +
> > > +linux,uefi-stub-generated-dtb = "true" means that it is true that the dtb
> > > +is generated by uefi stub
> > > +
> > > +or
> > > +
> > > +linux,uefi-stub-generated-dtb = "false" is the reverse.
> > 
> > I am sorry to have to make the discussion even more complex than already
> > is, however we have one more use case to consider: Linux booting on Xen
> > as Dom0.
> > 
> > When booting as Dom0 on ACPI hardware, Linux doesn't have access to the
> > UEFI firmware (no EFI stub). Xen passes a small device tree blob with
> > a chosen node, memory information and a pointer to the ACPI tables.
> > It looks similar to the DTB passed to Linux by the EFI stub but it is
> > generated by Xen instead.
> 
> We have two (or even three) different use cases here. One of them is a
> way to tell the kernel that there is no point in trying DT since it has
> been generated by the EFI stub and it doesn't have any SoC information.
> The kernel can bet on ACPI tables being present or just fail to boot.
> What I want to avoid is "acpi=force" parameter being part of the
> kernel/firmware ABI for using ACPI (whether DT is present or not).
> 
> We could call this something else ("linux,bare-dtb"?) if we want to use
> it in other situations but not "enable_acpi" as we don't want to move
> the ACPI enabling policy in the EFI stub or boot loader (or whatever
> generates the chosen node).
> 
> The Xen case is close to the kexec one. For the latter (I haven't looked
> at the current arm64 patches yet), I can see that you can pass an
> "acpi_rsdp" argument to the kernel with the ACPI RSDP address. I don't
> think that's ideal, we better have some defined DT bindings for such
> information in the absence of EFI. But it basically means that we'll
> allow ACPI on arm64 without EFI.

Good, I agree.


On Wed, 21 Jan 2015, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 03:29:52PM +0000, Jon Masters wrote:
> > On 01/21/2015 10:23 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > I have some questions for the ACPI and EFI folk:
> > > 
> > > 1. When booting with ACPI, are the EFI run-time services required for
> > >    anything? If yes, Xen may have a bigger problem
> > 
> > Yes. At least for some things. For example, installing an Operating
> > System would require that you make runtime services calls to set the
> > BootOrder/BootNext variables, and so on. Further, we use the GetTime
> > service and EFI based reboot to avoid having special drivers. I had
> > those added to SBBR as requirements for that reason.
> 
> So what would a kexec'ed kernel do here? Or we usually expect it to be
> short lived and doesn't need reboot, nor GetTime.
> 
> Xen is slightly more problematic but I wonder whether it could run a
> (paravirtualised) UEFI.

As a matter of fact that's how it is done on x86: Xen exports a
paravirtualized UEFI run-time services interface (drivers/xen/efi.c).
Daniel Kiper (CC'ed) wrote the code that went upstream last August.
There is no reason why we could not do the same on ARM.


> > > 2. Could a boot loader (either kernel doing kexec or Xen) emulate the
> > >    EFI system/config tables and still make them useful to the kernel but
> > >    without EFI_BOOT or EFI_RUNTIME_SERVICES?
> > 
> > Yes. But again, without the other required pieces (including the
> > services function pointers in the systab which are required) you'd crash
> > soon after boot trying to make those calls.
> 
> My point was whether you can still pass information like RSDP address
> via EFI tables but explicitly disable runtime services so that the
> kernel won't try to make such calls (and crash).
 
I don't think that run-time services are going to be a problem for Xen,
but I agree that it would be nice not to depend on them to have ACPI.