Re: [BUG] x86: reboot doesn't reboot

[Matthew Garrett]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 08:38:42AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 8:12 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Production hardware should never require CF9.
> 
> That's total BS.
> 
> The fact is, we may be doing something wrong, but ACPI fails on a
> *lot* of systems. A huge swath of Dell machines in particular for some
> reason (laptops, desktops, _and_ now there's tablet reports).

Which is almost certainly because the other reboot methods are trapping 
into SMI and hitting some hardware that we've left in a different state 
to Windows. CF9 may work around that, but the actual fix is to figure 
out why the firmware is wedging and fix it. Otherwise we're going to 
spend the rest of our lives maintaining a giant DMI list that's still 
going to be missing entries and users are going to be sad.

> The keyboard controller is sadly unreliable too, although I really
> don't understand why. Even when a legacy keyboard controller exists
> (which isn't as universal as you'd think, even though the *hardware*
> is pretty much guaranteed to be there in the chipset, it can be
> disabled) there seem to be machines where the reset line isn't hooked
> up. Don't ask me why. Same goes for the triple fault failure case.

See: SMI. Or in the triple fault case, because there's some early init 
code that has the same issue. As far as I can tell Windows never triple 
faults, so again I think this is our fault at some level.

> It would be interesting if somebody can figure out *exactly* what
> Windows does, because the fact that a lot of Dell machines need quirks
> almost certainly means that it's _us_ doing something wrong. Dell
> doesn't generally do lots of fancy odd things. I pretty much guarantee
> it's because we've done something odd that Windows doesn't do.

Windows hits the keyboard controller and then tries the ACPI vector. It 
then sleeps for a short period, then tries the keyboard controller again 
and the ACPI vector again. This means that systems which put cf9 in the 
ACPI vector tend to work because of the second write, which is obviously 
not what the spec envisaged but here we are. The only time it hits CF9 
is when the ACPI tables tell it to.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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