[PATCH 0/3] ARM: v7: get rid of boot time mini stack

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On Tue, 9 Feb 2021 at 00:12, Nicolas Pitre <nico at fluxnic.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 8 Feb 2021, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>
> > The v7 boot code uses a small chunk of BSS to preserve some register
> > contents across a call to v7_invalidate_l1 that occurs with the MMU and
> > caches disabled. Memory accesses in such cases are tricky on v7+, given
> > that the architecture permits some unintuitive behaviors (it is
> > implementation defined whether accesses done with the MMU and caches off
> > may hit in the caches, and on SoCs that incorporate off-core system
> > caches, this behavior appears to be different even between cache
> > levels). Also, cache invalidation is not safe under virtualization if
> > the intent is to retain stores issued directly to DRAM, given that the
> > hypervisor may upgrade invalidate operations to clean+invalidate,
> > resulting in DRAM contents to be overwritte by the dirty cachelines that
> > we were trying to evict in the first place.
> >
> > So let's address this issue, by removing the need for this stack to
> > exist in the first place: v7_invalidate_l1 can be rewritten to use fewer
> > registers, which means fewer registers need to be preserved, and we have
> > enough spare registers available.
>
> That is excellent.
>
> I wonder why r1-r3 were preserved though.
>

r1 and r2 are documented in head.S as

         * The processor init function will be called with:
         *  r1 - machine type
         *  r2 - boot data (atags/dt) pointer

but preserving the value of r3 does not seem necessary. Perhaps this
is a leftover from old code?