Problem: An application violating the architectural rules regarding
operation dependencies and having specific Register Stack Engine (RSE)
state at the time of the violation, may result in an illegal operation
fault and invalid RSE state. Such faults may initiate a cascade of
repeated illegal operation faults within OS interruption handlers.
The specific behavior is OS dependent.
Implication: An application causing an illegal operation fault with
specific RSE state may result in a series of illegal operation faults
and an eventual OS stack overflow condition.
Workaround: OS interruption handlers that switch to kernel backing
store implement a check for invalid RSE state to avoid the series
of illegal operation faults.
The core of the workaround is the RSE_WORKAROUND code sequence
inserted into each invocation of the SAVE_MIN_WITH_COVER and
SAVE_MIN_WITH_COVER_R19 macros. This sequence includes hard-coded
constants that depend on the number of stacked physical registers
being 96. The rest of this patch consists of code to disable this
workaround should this not be the case (with the presumption that
if a future Itanium processor increases the number of registers, it
would also remove the need for this patch).
Move the start of the RBS up to a mod32 boundary to avoid some
corner cases.
The dispatch_illegal_op_fault code outgrew the spot it was
squatting in when built with this patch and CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING=y
Move it out to the end of the ivt.
Signed-off-by: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
It's not efficient to use a per-cpu variable just to store
how many physical stack register a cpu has. Ever since the
incarnation of ia64 up till upcoming Montecito processor, that
variable has "glued" to 96. Having a variable in memory means
that the kernel is burning an extra cacheline access on every
syscall and kernel exit path. Such "static" value is better
served with the instruction patching utility exists today.
Convert ia64_phys_stacked_size_p8 into dynamic insn patching.
This also has a pleasant side effect of eliminating access to
per-cpu area while psr.ic=0 in the kernel exit path. (fixable
for per-cpu DTC work, but why bother?)
There are some concerns with the default value that the instruc-
tion encoded in the kernel image. It shouldn't be concerned.
The reasons are:
(1) cpu_init() is called at CPU initialization. In there, we
find out physical stack register size from PAL and patch
two instructions in kernel exit code. The code in question
can not be executed before the patching is done.
(2) current implementation stores zero in ia64_phys_stacked_size_p8,
and that's what the current kernel exit path loads the value with.
With the new code, it is equivalent that we store reg size 96
in ia64_phys_stacked_size_p8, thus creating a better safety net.
Given (1) above can never fail, having (2) is just a bonus.
All in all, this patch allow one less memory reference in the kernel
exit path, thus reducing syscall and interrupt return latency; and
avoid polluting potential useful data in the CPU cache.
Signed-off-by: Ken Chen <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Tony Luck