Alternative to arm64.nopauth cmdline for disabling Pointer Authentication

[Mark Rutland]

Hi Pavan, Marc,

On Thu, Dec 04, 2025 at 04:06:12PM +0530, Pavan Kondeti wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2025 at 09:15:29AM +0000, Marc Zyngier wrote:
> > On Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:07:15 +0000,
> > Pavan Kondeti <pavan.kondeti at oss.qualcomm.com> wrote:
> > > Hi
> > > 
> > > The pointer authentication feature (PAuth) is only supported on
> > > 0-3 CPUs but it is not supported on 4-7 CPUS on QCS8300.

> > On what grounds? Hardware incompatibility? I seriously doubt it,
> > since nobody glues pre-8.3 CPUs to anything more modern.

Marc, it seems like that's exactly that's happened here. :/

> I see that Linux runs at EL2 and AA64ISAR1 register values on CPU#0
> (A78) indicates that PAuth is supported but not for CPU#4 (A55). I am
> told, there are no other controls outside EL2 (trap) to manipulate
> this feature. So, I am assuming that this is indeed reflecting the HW.

Cortex-A78 doesn't have pointer authentication, but Cortex-A78C does, so
maybe you actually have Cortex-A78C?

What are the MIDRs on this SoC? e.g. the output of:

  cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/regs/identification/midr_el1 | sort | uniq

If this SoC has both Cortex-A78C and Cortex-A55, that's a rather
unfortunate combination that should have been caught at the SoC design
phase, as Marc alluded to.

[...]

> > > This patch [2] from Catalin adds a devicetree property under memory {}
> > > to disable MTE.

Catalin's patch was a bit different. It described whether the memory
range supported tags (and was actually a property of the memory). That
patch didn't make it into mainline AFAICT.

[...]

> I understand that this does not fall under errata but is
> there a possiblity to introduce an Errata targeting CPU#0 MIDR and
> disabling the Pointer authentication? I understand that if there is
> another Qualcomm SoC that exists with all CPUs supporting pointer
> authentication with same MIDR, we may be disabling the feature but this
> is something I can check internally.

I strongly suspect we cannot use the MIDR for this. Per:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=53a52a0ec7680287b170b36488203b5822e6da2d

... Qualcomm's Kryo {Prime,Gold,Silver} parts seem to identify
themselves as Arm ltd implementations, and those will appear in other
non-Qualcomm SoCs.

Without know *exactly* which MIDRs you have on this part, we cannot say.

Regardless, I strongly suspect that we have to live with the command
line option for these parts.

Mark.