linux-kernel - Re: Problem with atomic accesses in pstore on some ARM CPUs

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Date:	Tue, 16 Aug 2016 11:45:37 +0100
From:	Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>
To:	Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@....com>
Cc:	Guenter Roeck <groeck@...gle.com>,
	Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
	Jeffy Chen <jeffy.chen@...k-chips.com>,
	Colin Cross <ccross@...roid.com>,
	Tony Luck <tony.luck@...el.com>,
	Douglas Anderson <dianders@...omium.org>,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org
Subject: Re: Problem with atomic accesses in pstore on some ARM CPUs

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 11:32:04AM +0100, Robin Murphy wrote:
> On 16/08/16 00:19, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > we are having a problem with atomic accesses in pstore on some ARM
> > CPUs (specifically rk3288 and rk3399). With those chips, atomic
> > accesses fail with both pgprot_noncached and pgprot_writecombine
> > memory. Atomic accesses do work when selecting PAGE_KERNEL protection.
> 
> What's the pstore backed by? I'm guessing it's not normal DRAM.

Regardless, pgprot_noncached and pgprot_writecombine map to Device-nGnRnE
and Normal-non-cacheable respectively, and so it's IMP DEP whether or not
exclusives will work there.

> > Debugging on rk3399 shows the following crash.
> > 
> > [    0.912669] Bad mode in Error handler detected, code 0xbf000002 -- SError
> > [    0.920140] CPU: 4 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 4.4.14 #389
> > [    0.926838] Hardware name: Google Kevin (DT)
> > [    0.931533] task: ffffffc0edfe0000 ti: ffffffc0edf7c000 task.ti:
> > ffffffc0edf 7c000
> > [    0.939780] PC is at __ll_sc___cmpxchg_case_mb_4+0x2c/0x5c
> > [    0.945811] LR is at 0x1
> > 
> > The "solution" for this problem in various Chrome OS releases is to
> > disable atomic accesses in pstore entirely, which seems to be a bit
> > brute-force. Question is what a proper upstream-acceptable solution

Why do you require atomics to the pstore? If you need to serialise updates
from coherent observers (e.g. CPUs), is it acceptable to use a lock in
normal memory instead?

Will