Subject: [Qemu-devel] arm64 qemu tests failing in linux-next since 'arm64: kernel: enforce pmuserenr_el0 initialization and restore'

From: [email-masked] (Guenter Roeck)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2016 09:10:14 -0800

On 01/07/2016 08:37 AM, Lorenzo Pieralisi wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 07, 2016 at 03:58:15PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> On 7 January 2016 at 15:53, Lorenzo Pieralisi <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jan 07, 2016 at 01:25:35PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>>> We had previously been relying on the kernel not attempting to
>>>> touch the PMU if the ID_AA64DFR0_EL1 PMUVer bits read 0000
>>>> ("Performance Monitors extension System registers not implemented").
>>>
>>> Ok, thanks for looking into this. I wonder why reading pmcr_el0 does
>>> not suffer from the same problem though.
>>
>> Just a pragmatic thing on QEMU's end, I expect -- the kernel already
>> touched PMCR_EL0 and we wanted to be able to boot it, so we have an
>> implementation of it.
>
> If that's the case, that was the wrong approach IMHO. QEMU has to comply
> with the Aarch64 architecture which means that either the CPU it models
> has a Performance Monitors extension or it does not. If reading pmcr_el0
> does not fault I could tell you this is a QEMU regression because currently
> it _does_ model pmcr_el0 while (hopefully) ID_AA64DFR0_EL1 PMUVer reports
> it should not.
>

Strictly speaking you may be right (regression is a bit strong, though),
but for my part I tend to be pragmatic.

A warning message such as "Access to unimplemented register X" may be useful,
but effectively disabling all (older) aarch64 Linux kernels in qemu could be
seen as a bit dogmatic and would not be very helpful.

> I will add code that guards both register accesses to fix both bugs at
> once.
>

I assume you'll fix the the unconditional access(es) to pmcr_el0.

Question here is the scope of registers associated with PMUVer. Are there
any other registers which would need to be guarded ?

Thanks,
Guenter