Re: [PATCH v5 03/18] ACPI: processor: Register deferred CPUs from acpi_processor_get_info()

[Thomas Gleixner]

Russell!

On Fri, Apr 12 2024 at 22:52, Russell King (Oracle) wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 10:54:32PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>> > As for the cpu locking, I couldn't find anything in arch_register_cpu()
>> > that depends on the cpu_maps_update stuff nor needs the cpus_write_lock
>> > being taken - so I've no idea why the "make_present" case takes these
>> > locks.
>> 
>> Anything which updates a CPU mask, e.g. cpu_present_mask, after early
>> boot must hold the appropriate write locks. Otherwise it would be
>> possible to online a CPU which just got marked present, but the
>> registration has not completed yet.
>
> Yes. As far as I've been able to determine, arch_register_cpu()
> doesn't manipulate any of the CPU masks. All it seems to be doing
> is initialising the struct cpu, registering the embedded struct
> device, and setting up the sysfs links to its NUMA node.
>
> There is nothing obvious in there which manipulates any CPU masks, and
> this is rather my fundamental point when I said "I couldn't find
> anything in arch_register_cpu() that depends on ...".
>
> If there is something, then comments in the code would be a useful aid
> because it's highly non-obvious where such a manipulation is located,
> and hence why the locks are necessary.

acpi_processor_hotadd_init()
..
         acpi_map_cpu(pr->handle, pr->phys_id, pr->acpi_id, &pr->id);

That ends up in fiddling with cpu_present_mask.

I grant you that arch_register_cpu() is not, but it might rely on the
external locking too. I could not be bothered to figure that out.

>> Define "real hotplug" :)
>> 
>> Real physical hotplug does not really exist. That's at least true for
>> x86, where the physical hotplug support was chased for a while, but
>> never ended up in production.
>> 
>> Though virtualization happily jumped on it to hot add/remove CPUs
>> to/from a guest.
>> 
>> There are limitations to this and we learned it the hard way on X86. At
>> the end we came up with the following restrictions:
>> 
>>     1) All possible CPUs have to be advertised at boot time via firmware
>>        (ACPI/DT/whatever) independent of them being present at boot time
>>        or not.
>> 
>>        That guarantees proper sizing and ensures that associations
>>        between hardware entities and software representations and the
>>        resulting topology are stable for the lifetime of a system.
>> 
>>        It is really required to know the full topology of the system at
>>        boot time especially with hybrid CPUs where some of the cores
>>        have hyperthreading and the others do not.
>> 
>> 
>>     2) Hot add can only mark an already registered (possible) CPU
>>        present. Adding non-registered CPUs after boot is not possible.
>> 
>>        The CPU must have been registered in #1 already to ensure that
>>        the system topology does not suddenly change in an incompatible
>>        way at run-time.
>> 
>> The same restriction would apply to real physical hotplug. I don't think
>> that's any different for ARM64 or any other architecture.
>
> This makes me wonder whether the Arm64 has been barking up the wrong
> tree then, and whether the whole "present" vs "enabled" thing comes
> from a misunderstanding as far as a CPU goes.
>
> However, there is a big difference between the two. On x86, a processor
> is just a processor. On Arm64, a "processor" is a slice of the system
> (includes the interrupt controller, PMUs etc) and we must enumerate
> those even when the processor itself is not enabled. This is the whole
> reason there's a difference between "present" and "enabled" and why
> there's a difference between x86 cpu hotplug and arm64 cpu hotplug.
> The processor never actually goes away in arm64, it's just prevented
> from being used.

It's the same on X86 at least in the physical world.

Thanks,

        tglx