Subject: [PATCH v2] clocksource: arch_timer: Allow the device tree to specify the physical timer

From: [email-masked] (Christopher Covington)
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 07:22:50 -0400

On 09/16/2014 06:42 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 11:51:14PM +0100, Christopher Covington wrote:
>> Hi Sonny,
>>
>> On 09/15/2014 06:04 PM, Sonny Rao wrote:
>>> On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Sonny Rao <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 2:49 PM, Stephen Boyd <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>>>> On 09/15/14 14:47, Sonny Rao wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Stephen Boyd <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>>>>>> On 09/15/14 04:10, Catalin Marinas wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 07:59:29PM +0100, Stephen Boyd wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 09/12/14 05:14, Marc Zyngier wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> We surely can handle the UNDEF and do something there. We just can't do
>>>>>>>>>> it the way Doug described it above.
>>>>>>>>> I suggested doing that for something else a while ago and Will and Dave
>>>>>>>>> we're not thrilled[1]. The suggestion back then was to use DT to
>>>>>>>>> indicate what mode the kernel is running in.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> [1]
>>>>>>>>> http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2012-June/105321.html
>>>>>>>> I think the context was slightly different. As I re-read the thread, it
>>>>>>>> seems that the discussion was around whether to use some SMC interface
>>>>>>>> or not based on whether the kernel is running secure or non-secure. The
>>>>>>>> argument made by Will was to actually specify the type of the firmware
>>>>>>>> SMC interface in the DT and use it in the kernel (and probably assume
>>>>>>>> the kernel is running in secure mode if no smc interface is specified in
>>>>>>>> the DT; you could have both though, running in secure mode and also
>>>>>>>> having firmware).
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> In this arch timer case, we need to work around a firmware bug (or
>>>>>>>> feature as 32-bit ARM kernels never required CNTVOFF initialisation by
>>>>>>>> firmware, no matter how small such firmware is). We don't expect a
>>>>>>>> specific SMC call to initialise CNTVOFF, so we can't describe it in the
>>>>>>>> DT.
>>>>>>> Agreed, we can't described SMC calls that don't exist. From my
>>>>>>> perspective it's just another part of the cpu boot sequence that needs
>>>>>>> to be handled in the kernel, so describing the requirement via the
>>>>>>> cpu-boot method seems appropriate. It seems like we're making it harder
>>>>>>> than it should be by handling the undef when we could have slightly
>>>>>>> different SMP boot code (and suspend/resume code) depending on the boot
>>>>>>> method property.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> +heiko
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So, for the case of rk3288, based on this discussion what I'm going to
>>>>>> propose is to add code to rockchip.c which looks for a particular SMP
>>>>>> enable method -- say something like "rockchip,rk3288-smp-secure-svc"
>>>>>> which will then assume we have been booted in secure SVC mode and do
>>>>>> the CNTVOFF fixup.  I believe, it will need to do this on the boot CPU
>>>>>> as well, so I think it will need to scan the DT fairly early on the
>>>>>> boot CPU and also perform the function there.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'll look into implementing this and post code.  Comments and
>>>>>> suggestions appreciated, thanks.
>>>>>
>>>>> What goes wrong if we read the cntvoff from the boot CPU during
>>>>> smp_prepare_cpus() phase and use that to set the cntvoff on the other
>>>>> CPUs? That avoids needing to do anything very early by making the value
>>>>> the same. It does mean that cntvoff is some random out of reset value
>>>>> for CPU0, but at least it's consistent.
>>>>
>>>> I think we cannot read the value if we're not in hyp mode.
>>>
>>> Well, thinking about it a little more, I think you still have a good point.
>>>
>>> We don't need to do this early on, as long as we haven't started using
>>> the arch timers yet.  If we are still able to do this at the point
>>> where we're executing the code in arch/arm/mach-rockchip/platsmp.c
>>> that finds the enable method then we can just handle it there.
>>
>> I've been playing around with the probe-based approach and while I need to do
>> a lot more testing, it seems to be working for the first tens of instructions.
>> I hope to be able to share a draft of that soon. Basically, I just read the
>> current NSACR value and write it back (although maybe in the long term we
>> would want to make sure a few of those bits are set or cleared). If that
>> succeeds, we know we're in secure SVC and can proceed to set up MON and HYP.
> 
> But when it doesn't succeed, you get an undefined instruction fault
> (since NSACR is only writable in secure mode).

Yes. I see it as a conditional branch to VBAR+4 with a mode switch side effect.

Christopher

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