Re: [PATCH v3 0/1] arm64: Add workaround for Fujitsu A64FX erratum 010001

[James Morse]

Hi guys,

On 01/29/2019 06:10 PM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> Could you please copy the whole description from the cover letter to the
> actual patch and only send one email (full description as in here
> together with the patch)? If we commit this to the kernel, it would be
> useful to have the information in the log for reference later on.
>
> More comments below:
>
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 12:29:58PM +0000, Zhang, Lei wrote:
> > On some variants of the Fujitsu-A64FX cores ver(1.0, 1.1),
> > memory accesses may cause undefined fault (Data abort, DFSC=0b111111).
> > This problem will be fixed by next version of Fujitsu-A64FX.
> >
> > This fault occurs under a specific hardware condition
> > when a load/store instruction perform an address translation using:
> >    case-1  TTBR0_EL1 with TCR_EL1.NFD0 == 1.
> >    case-2  TTBR0_EL2 with TCR_EL2.NFD0 == 1.
> >    case-3  TTBR1_EL1 with TCR_EL1.NFD1 == 1.
> >    case-4  TTBR1_EL2 with TCR_EL2.NFD1 == 1.
> > And this fault occurs completely spurious.
>
> So this looks like new information on the hardware behaviour since the
> v2 of the patch. Can this fault occur for any type of instruction
> accessing the memory or only for SVE instructions?
>
> > Since TCR_ELx.NFD1 is set to '1' at the kernel in versions
> > past 4.17, the case-3 or case-4 may happen.
> >
> > This fault can be taken only at stage-1,
> > so this fault is taken from EL0 to EL1/EL2, from EL1 to EL1,
> > or from EL2 to EL2.
> >
> > I would like to post a workaround to avoid this problem on
> > existing Fujitsu-A64FX version.
>
> How likely is it to trigger this erratum? In other words, aren't we
> better off with a spurious fault that we ignore rather than toggling the
> TCR_ELx.NFD1 bit?

It sounds like the spurious fault can occur as a result of load/store. 
('there is no load/store instruction between'...).

If this can happen in kernel_enter it will overwrite the exception 
registers, and we lose the original ELR.

If load/store trigger it, I don't think we can ignore it.

Thanks,

James