ARM BCM53573 SoC hangs/lockups caused by locks/clock/random changes

[Russell King (Oracle)]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2023 at 11:25:57AM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> 
> On 9/4/23 04:33, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
> > As those hangs/lockups are related to so many different changes it's
> > really hard to debug them.
> > 
> > This bug seems to be specific to the slow arch clock that affects
> > stability only when kernel locking code and symbols layout trigger some
> > very specific timing.
> > 
> > Enabling CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING seems to make issue go away but it affects
> > so much code it's hard to tell why it actually matters.
> > 
> > Same for disabling CONFIG_SMP. I noticed Broadcom's SDK keeps it
> > disabled. I tried it and it improves stability (I had 3 devices with 6
> > days of uptime and counting) indeed. Again it affects a lot of kernel
> > parts so it's hard to tell why it helps.
> > 
> > Unless someone comes up with some magic solution I'll probably try
> > building BCM53573 images without CONFIG_SMP for my personal needs.
> 
> All the locking operations rely on the fact that the instruction to acquire
> or release a lock is atomic. Is it possible that it may not be the case
> under certain circumstances for this ARM BCM53573 SoC? Or maybe some Kconfig
> options are not set correctly like missing some errata that are needed.
> 
> I don't know enough about the 32-bit arm architecture to say whether this is
> the case or not, but that is my best guess.

So, BCM53573 is Cortex-A7, which is ARMv7, which has the exclusive
load/store instructions. Whether the SoC has the necessary exclusive
monitors to support these instructions is another matter, and I
suspect someone with documentation would need to check that.

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