Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] arm64: provide pseudo NMI with GICv3

[Marc Zyngier <marc.zyngier@arm.com>]

On 01/05/18 21:51, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 2:46 AM Julien Thierry <julien.thierry@arm.com>
> wrote:
> [...]
>>> On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 3:54 AM, Julien Thierry <julien.thierry@arm.com>
> wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> This series is a continuation of the work started by Daniel [1]. The
> goal
>>>> is to use GICv3 interrupt priorities to simulate an NMI.
>>>>
>>>> To achieve this, set two priorities, one for standard interrupts and
>>>> another, higher priority, for NMIs. Whenever we want to disable
> interrupts,
>>>> we mask the standard priority instead so NMIs can still be raised. Some
>>>> corner cases though still require to actually mask all interrupts
>>>> effectively disabling the NMI.
>>>>
>>>> Of course, using priority masking instead of PSR.I comes at some cost.
> On
>>>> hackbench, the drop of performance seems to be >1% on average for this
>>>> version. I can only attribute that to recent changes in the kernel as
>>>
>>> Do you have more specific performance data on the performance overhead
>>> with this series?
>>>
> 
>> Not at the moment. I was planning on doing a v3 anyway considering this
>> series is getting a bit old and the GICv3 driver has had some
> modifications.
> 
> Great! Looking forward to it, will try to find some time to review this set
> as well.
> 
>> Once I get to it I can try to have more detailed performance data on a
>> recent kernel. I've really only measured the performance on hackbench
>> and on kernel build from defconfig (and for the kernel build the
>> performance difference was completely hidden by the noise).
> 
>>>> hackbench seems slightly slower compared to my other benchmarks while
> the
>>>> runs with the use of GICv3 priorities have stayed in the same time
> frames.
>>>> KVM Guests do not seem to be affected preformance-wise by the host
> using
>>>> PMR to mask interrupts or not.
>>>>
>>>> Currently, only PPIs and SPIs can be set as NMIs. IPIs being currently
>>>> hardcoded IRQ numbers, there isn't a generic interface to set SGIs as
> NMI
>>>> for now. I don't think there is any reason LPIs should be allowed to
> be set
>>>> as NMI as they do not have an active state.
>>>> When an NMI is active on a CPU, no other NMI can be triggered on the
> CPU.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Requirements to use this:
>>>> - Have GICv3
>>>> - SCR_EL3.FIQ is set to 1 when linux runs
>>>
>>> Ah I see it mentioned here. Again, can you clarify if this is
>>> something that can be misconfigured? Is it something that the
>>> bootloader sets?
>>>
> 
>> Yes, this is something that the bootloader sets and we have seen a few
>> cases where it is set to 0, so it can be "misconfigured".
> 
>> It is not impossible to handle this case, but this bit affects the view
>> the GICv3 CPU interface has on interrupt priority values. However it
>> requires to add some conditions in both the interrupt handling and
>> masking/unmasking code, so ideally we would avoid adding things to this.
> 
>> But the idea is that Linux only deals with group 1 interrupts, and group
>> 1 interrupts are only signaled as FIQs when the execution state is
>> secure or at EL3, which should never happen in Linux's case. So ideally
>> we'd like firmwares to set up this bit properly rather than to have to
>> deal with both cases when only one of them makes sense for Linux.
> 
>  From what I see, on all our platforms, FIQs are delivered to the secure
> monitor only. Which is the reason for this patchset in the first place. I
> can't imagine a usecase that is not designed like this (and have not come
> across this), so its probably Ok to just assume SCR_EL3.FIQ is to 1.
> 
> In the future, if SCR_EL3.FIQ is set 0, then the NMI should use the FIQ
> mechanism delivered to the non-secure OS.
> 
> Does what I say make sense or was I just shooting arrows in the dark? :-P

It would mean teaching Group-0 interrupts to the arm64 kernel. Not an
impossible task, but that'd be catering for a minority of broken
systems. In my book, that's at the absolute bottom of the priority range
(pun intended...).

	M.
-- 
Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny...