Re: [PATCH v2] platform/x86: add Gigabyte WMI temperature driver

["Thomas Weißschuh" <linux@weissschuh.net>]

On Do, 2021-04-08T08:00-0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> On 4/8/21 2:36 AM, Hans de Goede wrote:
> > On 4/7/21 9:43 PM, Thomas Weißschuh wrote:
> >> On Mi, 2021-04-07T17:54+0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> > Jean, Guenter,
> > 
> > Thomas has been working on a WMI driver to expose various motherboard
> > temperatures on a gigabyte board where the IO-addresses for the it87 chip
> > are reserved by ACPI. We are discussing how best to deal with this, there
> > are some ACPI methods to directly access the super-IO registers (with locking
> > to protect against other ACPI accesses). This reminded me of an idea I had
> > a while ago to solve a similar issue with an other superIO chip, abstract
> > the superIO register access-es using some reg_ops struct and allow an ACPI/WMI
> > driver to provide alternative reg_ops:
> > https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204807#c47
> > 
> > Do you think this is a good idea (or a bad one)? And would something like that
> > be acceptable to you ?
> > 
> 
> The upstream it87 driver is severely out of date. I had an out-of-tree driver
> with various improvements which I didn't upstream, first because no one was willing
> to review changes and then because it had deviated too much. I pulled it from
> public view because I got pounded for not upstreaming it, because people started
> demanding support (not asking, demanding) for it, and because Gigabyte stopped
> providing datasheets for the more recent ITE chips and it became effectively
> unmaintainable.
> 
> Some ITE chips have issues which can cause system hangs if accessed directly.
> I put some work to remedy that into the non-upstream driver, but that was all
> just guesswork. Gigabyte knows about the problem (or so I was told from someone
> who has an NDA with them), but I didn't get them or ITE to even acknowledge it
> to me. I even had a support case open with Gigabyte for a while, but all I could
> get out of them is that they don't support Linux and what I would have to reproduce
> the problem with Windows for them to provide assistance (even though, again,
> they knew about it).
> 
> As for using ACPI locks or WMI to ensure that ACPI leaves the chip alone while
> the driver accesses chips directly: That is an option, but it has (at least)
> two problems.
> 
> First, ACPI access methods are not well documented or standardized. I had tried
> to find useful means to do that some time ago, but I gave up because each board
> (even from the same vendor) handles locking and accesses differently. We would
> end up with lots of board specific code. Coincidentally, that was for ASUS boards
> and the nct6775 driver.

At least for all the Gigabyte ACPI tables I have looked at all access is done
via two-byte "OperationRegion" over the Index/Data addresses, a "Field" with
two entries for these and an "IndexField" that is actually used to perform the
accesses.
As the IndexField is synchronized via "Lock" it should take a lock on the
OperationRegion itself.

So I think we should be technically fine with validating these assumption and
then also taking locks on the OperationRegion.

If it is reasonable to do so is another question.

> Second, access through ACPI is only one of the issues. Turns out there are two
> ITE chips on many of the Gigabyte boards nowadays, and the two chips talk to each
> other using I2C. My out-of-tree driver tried to remedy that by blocking those
> accesses while the driver used the chip, but, again, without Gigabyte / ITE
> support this was never a perfect solution, and there was always the risk that
> the board ended up hanging because that access was blocked for too long.
> Recent ITE chips solve that problem by providing memory mapped access to the
> chip registers, but that is only useful if one has a datasheet.

Are both of these chips available at the two well-known registers 0x2e and
0x4e?

Would this too-long blocking also occur when only accessing single registers
for read-only access?
Any write access would probably have to be blocked anyways.

> Overall, I don't think it makes much sense trying to make significant changes
> to the it87 driver without pulling in all the changes I had made, and without
> finding a better fix for the cross-chip access problems. I for sure won't have
> time for that (and getting hwmon patches reviewed is still very much an issue).
> 
> Having said that, I am of course open to adding WMI/ACPI drivers for the various
> boards. Good luck getting support from Gigabyte, though. Or from ASUS, for that
> matter.

Thomas