Re: [PATCH v2 06/18] arm64: arch_timer: Add infrastructure for multiple erratum detection methods

[Daniel Lezcano]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 03:48:23PM +0100, Marc Zyngier wrote:
> On 28/03/17 15:36, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 03:07:52PM +0100, Marc Zyngier wrote:
> > 
> > [ ... ]
> > 
> >>>>> -bool arch_timer_check_global_cap_erratum(const struct arch_timer_erratum_workaround *wa,
> >>>>> -					 const void *arg)
> >>>>> +bool arch_timer_check_cap_erratum(const struct arch_timer_erratum_workaround *wa,
> >>>>> +				  const void *arg)
> >>>>>  {
> >>>>> -	return cpus_have_cap((uintptr_t)wa->id);
> >>>>> +	return cpus_have_cap((uintptr_t)wa->id) | this_cpu_has_cap((uintptr_t)wa->id);
> >>>>
> >>>> Not quite. Here, you're making all capability-based errata to be be
> >>>> global (if a single CPU in the system has a capability, then by
> >>>> transitivity cpus_have_cap returns true). If that's a big-little system,
> >>>> you end-up applying the workaround to all CPUs, including those unaffected.
> >>>>
> >>>> I'd rather drop cpus_have_cap altogether and rely on individual CPU
> >>>> matching (since we don't have a need for a global capability erratum
> >>>> handling yet).
> >>>
> >>> Ok, thanks.
> >>
> >> Quick update. I've just implemented this, and found out that getting rid
> >> of local/global has an unfortunate effect:
> >>
> >> Since we only probe the global errata (using ACPI for example) on the
> >> boot CPU path, we lose propagation of the erratum across the secondary
> >> CPUs. One way of solving this is to convert the secondary boot path to
> >> be aware of DT vs ACPI vs detection method of the month. Which isn't
> >> easy, since by the time we boot secondary CPUs, we don't have the
> >> pointers to the various ACPI tables anymore. Also, assuming we were
> >> careful and saved the pointers, the tables may have been unmapped. Fun.
> > 
> > My proposal was supposed to prevent that. The detecion is done in the
> > subsystems, ACPI detects ACPI errata, DT detects DT errata and CPU detects CPU
> > errata. The drivers get the errata and enable the workaround. The id
> > association <-> errata self contains errata types (void *, char *, int). So
> > everything can be done in a CPU basis without local / global dance.
> 
> I'm sorry, but it feels like a Jumbo-Jet sized hammer to try and squash
> a fly (I'm staying away from the frozen shark metaphor here). You're
> willing to add a whole list of things with private ids that need
> matching to kill a flag? I don't think this buys us anything but extra
> complexity and another maintenance headache.

Well, it is like your approach except it is split in two steps.

Can you explain where is the extra complexity ? May be I am missing the point.

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