Re: [PATCH] ia64: remove paravirt code

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Tony Luck <tony.luck@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez
> <mcgrof@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> From: "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@xxxxxxxx>
>>
>> All the ia64 pvops code is now dead code since both
>> xen and kvm support have been ripped out [0] [1]. Just
>> that no one had troubled to rip this stuff out. The only
>> useful remaining pieces were the old pvops docs but that
>> was recently also generalized and moved out from ia64 [2].
>>
>> This has been run time tested on an ia64 Madison system.
>>
>> [0] 003f7de625890 "KVM: ia64: remove" since v3.19-rc1
>> [1] d52eefb47d4eb "ia64/xen: Remove Xen support for ia64" since v3.14-rc1
>> [2] "virtual: Documentation: simplify and generalize paravirt_ops.txt"
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof@xxxxxxxx>
>> ---
>> I've build and run time tested this against linux-next tag next-20150529.
>> The build will fail if you've enabled the LKDTM (Linux Kernel Dump Test
>> Tool Module) enabled on SLE11 ia64 builds, a fix for which I've just
>> posted [3].
>>
>> [3] https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=143327018731361&w=2
>
>
> So this builds cleanly on all my test configurations, and boots on
> the one machine that I tried it on - good job.

Thanks!

> But I'm wondering how much of this was auto-generated (and
> so perhaps free from typos) and how much was done by hand?

I did this work to help study alternatives to how pvops was
implemented on other architectures, so I studied the patches that
introduced the code meticulously and then used my editor / editor
regexps to make substitutions as needed and shift code as needed.
Compile testing found some minor typos, which were easy to fix.

> It isn't a full revert of the patch series that added paravirt ... you
> simplified macros like:
>  #define MOV_TO_KR(kr, reg, clob0, clob1)       \
> -       mov IA64_KR(kr) = reg                   \
> -       CLOBBER(clob0)                          \
> -       CLOBBER(clob1)
> +       mov IA64_KR(kr) = reg
>
> but didn't remove them completely.

Right, this IMHO was not necessary at this point but I can understand
if you want that. I think that could be done as a separate patch too
though and perhaps done through a machine, not human and manually.

> So what can I do to validate this 4000+ line patch?  Can I compare
> disassembled ".o" files pre/post patch somehow to be sure this doesn't
> have some small typo errors somewhere?

Its quite a huge chunk of code removed, I doubt that .o files would
remain intact after this, but I could be wrong. I think run time
validation and examination of the code changes, understanding of the
code changes is necessary, but also likely just as run time tests.

Is there no ia64 regression test suite?

I don't see ia64 getting much love anyway these days so would it not
hurt to merge and spin through linux-next for a while and if no issues
are reported make it fly in?

 Luis
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