[PATCH v5 0/7] arm64: efi: leave MMU and caches on at boot

[Will Deacon]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2022 at 05:36:19PM +0000, Mark Rutland wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 08, 2022 at 07:21:57PM +0100, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > The purpose of this series is to remove any explicit cache maintenance
> > for coherency during early boot that becomes unnecessary if we simply
> > retain the cacheable 1:1 mapping of all of system RAM provided by EFI,
> > and use it to populate the ID map page tables. After setting up this
> > preliminary ID map, we disable the MMU, drop to EL1, reprogram the MAIR,
> > TCR and SCTLR registers as before, and proceed as usual, avoiding the
> > need for any manipulations of memory while the MMU and caches are off.
> > 
> > The only properties of the firmware provided 1:1 map we rely on is that
> > it does not require any explicit cache maintenance for coherency, and
> > that it covers the entire memory footprint of the image, including the
> > BSS and padding at the end - all else is under control of the kernel
> > itself, as before.
> 
> As a high-level thing, I'm still very much not keen on entering the kernel with
> the MMU on. Given that we have to support booting with the MMU off for !EFI
> boot (including kexec when EFI is in use), I think this makes it harder to
> reason about the boot code overall (e.g. due to the conditional maintenance
> added to head.S), and adds more scope for error, even if it simplifies the EFI
> stub itself.

As discussed offline, two things that would help the current series are:

  (1) Some performance numbers comparing MMU off vs MMU on boot

  (2) Use of a separate entry point for the MMU on case, potentially failing
      the boot if the MMU is on and we're not using EFI

Will