Re: [PATCH] x86, perf: Tweak broken BIOS rules during check_hw_exists

[George Dunlap]

On 05/21/2015 06:57 PM, George Dunlap wrote:
> On 05/18/2015 08:16 PM, Don Zickus wrote:
>> I stumbled upon an AMD box that had the BIOS using a hardware counter.  Instead
>> of printing out a warning and continuing, it failed and blocked further perf
>> counter usage.
>>
>> Looking through the history, I found commit a5ebe0ba3dff had tweaked the rules
>> for a xen guest on an almost identical box and now changed the behaviour.
>>
>> Unfortunately the rules were tweaked incorrectly and will always lead to msr
>> failures even though the msrs are completely fine.
>>
>> What happens now is in arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c::check_hw_exists:
>>
>> <snip>
>>         for (i = 0; i < x86_pmu.num_counters; i++) {
>>                 reg = x86_pmu_config_addr(i);
>>                 ret = rdmsrl_safe(reg, &val);
>>                 if (ret)
>>                         goto msr_fail;
>>                 if (val & ARCH_PERFMON_EVENTSEL_ENABLE) {
>>                         bios_fail = 1;
>>                         val_fail = val;
>>                         reg_fail = reg;
>>                 }
>>         }
>>
>> <snip>
>>         /*
>>          * Read the current value, change it and read it back to see if it
>>          * matches, this is needed to detect certain hardware emulators
>>          * (qemu/kvm) that don't trap on the MSR access and always return 0s.
>>          */
>>         reg = x86_pmu_event_addr(0);
>> 				^^^^
>>
>> if the first perf counter is enabled, then this routine will always fail
>> because the counter is running. :-(
>>
>>         if (rdmsrl_safe(reg, &val))
>>                 goto msr_fail;
>>         val ^= 0xffffUL;
>>         ret = wrmsrl_safe(reg, val);
>>         ret |= rdmsrl_safe(reg, &val_new);
>>         if (ret || val != val_new)
>>                 goto msr_fail;
>>
>> The above bios_fail used to be a 'goto' which is why it worked in the past.
>>
>> Further, most vendors have migrated to using fixed counters to hide their
>> evilness hence this problem rarely shows up now days except on a few old boxes.
>>
>> I fixed my problem and kept the spirit of the original Xen fix, by recording a
>> safe non-enable register to be used safely for the reading/writing check.
>> Because it is not enabled, this passes on bare metal boxes (like metal), but
>> should continue to throw an msr_fail on Xen guests because the register isn't
>> emulated yet.
>>
>> Now I get a proper bios_fail error message and Xen should still see their
>> msr_fail message (untested).
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@xxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> Right -- so what was actually broken was the "does this register work"
> check, which needs a non-enabled register.
> 
> Would it make sense to add a comment somewhere in the code saying that
> you need a disabled event counter for the MSR check to work properly?
> It's sort of implied but it's not explicit.
> 
> Other than that, this looks good to me.  I'm not positive I have access
> to the box I needed this for anymore -- I'll take a look for it next week.
> 
> In the mean time:
> 
> Acked-by: George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

I managed to track down the machine that had the problem and verify that
things still work for me after this patch.  So now you can add:

Tested-by: George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks,
 -George
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