Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] PCI: Allow user to request power management of conventional and hotplug bridges

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On 2/22/2018 2:18 PM, Lukas Wunner wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 12:15:54PM -0600, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> > Basically I was hoping to partially rectify what I think was a mistake
> > on my part when we merged this.  9d26d3a8f1b0 ("PCI: Put PCIe ports
> > into D3 during suspend") is somewhat misleading because it suggests
> > that PCI bridge power management can only be supported on non-hotplug
> > PCIe ports, when in fact this was mostly a question of testing and "we
> > know this works on the systems we care about so we're going to
> > minimize our risk by excluding others".  These constraints seem pretty
> > Intel-centric and it's not clear how or whether they apply to other
> > architectures.
> >
> > Adding the comments will help with that some, but in general I don't
> > like to artificially limit feature support because it reduces testing
> > exposure and makes future maintenance more difficult.
> >
> > For example, we disallow D3 for hotplug bridges.  I don't think the
> > spec requires that, so the fact that we put that limitation in
> > suggests that there was some issue we didn't fully understand, and now
> > it will be hard to go back and figure that out if and when we *do*
> > want to support D3 for hotplug bridges.
> Some x86 machines which handle hotplug in firmware, rather than natively
> by the OS, require that the OS doesn't transition them to D3hot behind
> the firmware's back.  That's the reason why Mika excluded them from
> runtime PM:
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53811
>
> If the OS handles hotplug natively, transitioning the ports to D3hot
> should be fine in theory.  I submitted this series last May to extend
> runtime PM to those:
> https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-pci/msg60962.html
>
> However Ashok Raj tested them on a Xeon-SP system and got Hardware Errors:
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/3/480
>
> I'm not sure if I've done anything wrong in that series or if we're
> dealing with an incompatibility of this particular platform with D3hot
> on hotplug ports.

Thanks for mentioning that, and for the pointers!

> We do need runtime PM on hotplug ports to power off Thunderbolt
> controllers when nothing is plugged in.  That saves 1.5 W, so a
> noticeable amount of power.  I was going to respin the series one
> of these days, I think the best I can do is continue to forbid
> runtime PM on hotplug ports by default, but whitelist it for
> Thunderbolt and allow manually enabling it on other platforms via
> the command line.  That way, vendors are put in a position to
> validate their platforms for runtime PM of hotplug ports, and
> perhaps someday we can enable it for all platforms by default,
> but with a BIOS cut-off date.
>
> As for the existing 2015 cut-off for non-hotplug ports, I remember
> Rafael writing that we may try to slowly push the cut-off further
> back into the past and stop as soon as problems are reported.
> That hasn't happened yet because noone had a need for it.

Right.

There's more background related to this particular thing worth 
mentioning IMO. I'll write about it later today.

Thanks,
Rafael