ARM board lockups/hangs triggered by locks and mutexes

[Rafał Miłecki]

On 18.08.2023 22:23, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
> On 14.08.2023 11:04, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
>> Hi Rafal,
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 1:11 PM Rafał Miłecki <zajec5 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 4.08.2023 13:07, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
>>>> I triple checked that. Dropping a single unused function breaks kernel /
>>>> device stability on BCM53573!
>>>>
>>>> AFAIK the only thing below diff actually affects is location of symbols
>>>> (I actually verified that by comparing System.map before and after -
>>>> over 22'000 of relocated symbols).
>>>>
>>>> Can some unfortunate location of symbols cause those hangs/lockups?
>>>
>>> I performed another experiment. First I dropped mtd_check_of_node() to
>>> bring kernel back to the stable state.
>>>
>>> Then I started adding useless code to the mtdchar_unlocked_ioctl(). I
>>> ended up adding just enough to make sure all post-mtd symbols in
>>> System.map got the same offset as in case of backporting
>>> mtd_check_of_node().
>>>
>>> I started experiencing lockups/hangs again.
>>>
>>> I repeated the same test with adding dumb code to the brcm_nvram_probe()
>>> and verifying symbols offsets following brcm_nvram_probe one.
>>>
>>> I believe this confirms that this problem is about offset or alignment
>>> of some specific symbol(s). The remaining question is what symbols and
>>> how to fix or workaround that.
>>
>> I had similar experiences on other ARM platforms many years ago:
>> bisection lead to something completely bogus, and it turned out
>> adding a single line of innocent code made the system lock-up or crash
>> unexpectedly.  It was definitely related to alignment, as adding the
>> right extra amount of innocent code would fix the problem. Until some
>> later change changing alignment again...
>> I never found the real cause, but the problems went away over time.
>> I am not sure I did enable all required errata config options, so I
>> may have missed some...
> 
> I already experiented some weird performance variations on Broadcom's
> Northstar platform that was related to symbols layout & cache hit/miss
> ratio. For that reason I use -falign-functions=32 for that whole
> OpenWrt's "bcm53xx" target (it covers Northstar and BCM53573). So
> this aspect should be ruled out already in my case.

Relevant OpenWrt commit with some description and links: b54ef39e0b91 ("bcm53xx: use -falign-functions=32 for kernel compilation"):

https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commitdiff;h=b54ef39e0b910a4b8eaca0497fe9b63e8392262a