Subject: Re: rtc-opal: Fix handling of firmware error codes, prevent busy loops

From: Alexandre Belloni <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 03:26:46 +0100

Hi,

On 02/08/2016 at 11:50:16 +1000, Stewart Smith wrote:
> According to the OPAL docs:
> https://github.com/open-power/skiboot/blob/skiboot-5.2.5/doc/opal-api/opal-rtc-read-3.txt
> https://github.com/open-power/skiboot/blob/skiboot-5.2.5/doc/opal-api/opal-rtc-write-4.txt
> OPAL_HARDWARE may be returned from OPAL_RTC_READ or OPAL_RTC_WRITE and this
> indicates either a transient or permanent error.
> 
> Prior to this patch, Linux was not dealing with OPAL_HARDWARE being a
> permanent error particularly well, in that you could end up in a busy
> loop.
> 
> This was not too hard to trigger on an AMI BMC based OpenPOWER machine
> doing a continuous "ipmitool mc reset cold" to the BMC, the result of
> that being that we'd get stuck in an infinite loop in opal_get_rtc_time.
> 
> We now retry a few times before returning the error higher up the stack.
> 
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Signed-off-by: Stewart Smith <[email-masked]>
> ---
>  drivers/rtc/rtc-opal.c | 12 ++++++++++--
>  1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 

Just a note to let you know that this patch should have gone through my
tree but it was not sent to linux-rtc or me.

I guess what happened is that Michael cleaned up the Linux PPC patchwork
queue.

-- 
Alexandre Belloni, Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons)
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
http://bootlin.com