Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL 5.4 095/108] ARM: shmobile: Enable ARM_GLOBAL_TIMER on Cortex-A9 MPCore SoCs

From: Sasha Levin
Date: Fri Apr 17 2020 - 13:18:08 EST


On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 10:44:01AM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
Hi Sasha,

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 1:11 AM Sasha Levin <sashal@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert+renesas@xxxxxxxxx>

[ Upstream commit 408324a3c5383716939eea8096a0f999a0665f7e ]

SH-Mobile AG5 and R-Car H1 SoCs are based on the Cortex-A9 MPCore, which
includes a global timer.

Enable the ARM global timer on these SoCs, which will be used for:
- the scheduler clock, improving scheduler accuracy from 10 ms to 3 or
4 ns,
- delay loops, allowing removal of calls to shmobile_init_delay() from
the corresponding machine vectors.

Note that when using an old DTB lacking the global timer, the kernel
will still work. However, loops-per-jiffies will no longer be preset,
and the delay loop will need to be calibrated during boot.

I.e. to avoid this delay, this patch is best backported after backporting
8443ffd1bbd5be74 ("ARM: dts: r8a7779: Add device node for ARM global timer"),
df1a0aac0a533e6f ("ARM: dts: sh73a0: Add device node for ARM global timer").

While the former has been backported to v5.[45]-stable, the latter hasn't,
probably because it depends on
61b58e3f6e518c51 ("ARM: dts: sh73a0: Rename twd clock to periph clock")

So please backport the last two commits first.

Done, thanks!

--
Thanks,
Sasha