Date: Wed, 8 May 2024 10:38:26 +0200
From: "Linux regression tracking (Thorsten Leemhuis)"
 <regressions@...mhuis.info>
To: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>, Lyude Paul <lyude@...hat.com>
Cc: x86@...nel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
 Mario Limonciello <mario.limonciello@....com>, Borislav Petkov
 <bp@...en8.de>, Linux kernel regressions list <regressions@...ts.linux.dev>
Subject: Re: Early boot regression from f0551af0213 ("x86/topology: Ignore
 non-present APIC IDs in a present package")

H! Lyude, Thomas, what's the status here? From here it looks like we
were close to a fix, but then it turned out to be a bad fix -- and
afterwards nothing much seems to have happened. Did it fall through the
cracks, or was this already fixed and I just missed that?

Ciao, Thorsten (wearing his 'the Linux kernel's regression tracker' hat)

On 02.05.24 12:33, Mario Limonciello wrote:
> On 4/25/2024 16:42, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 25 2024 at 11:56, Lyude Paul wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2024-04-25 at 04:11 +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Can you please boot a kernel with the commit in question reverted and
>>>> add 'possible_cpus=8' to the kernel command line?
>>>>
>>>> In theory this should fail too.
>>>
>>> Yep - tried booting a kernel with f0551af0213 reverted and
>>> possible_cpus=8, it definitely looks like that crashes things as well
>>> in the same way.
>>
>> Good. That means it's a problem which existed before but went unnoticed.
>>
>>> Also - it scrolled off the screen before I had a chance to write it
>>> down, but I'm -fairly- sure I saw some sort of complaint about "16 [or
>>> some double digit number] processors exceeds max number of 8". Which
>>> is quite interesting, as this is definitely just a quad core ryzen
>>> processor with hyperthreading - so there should only be 8 threads.
>>
>> Right, that's what we saw with the debug patch. The ACPI/MADT table
>> is clearly bonkers. The effect of it is that it pretends that the system
>> has 16 possible CPUs:
>>
>>      [    0.089381] CPU topo: Allowing 8 present CPUs plus 8 hotplug CPUs
>>
>> Which in turn changes the sizing of the per CPU data and affects some
>> other details which depend on the number of possible CPUs.
> 
> At least this aspect of this I suspect is caused by commit
> fed8d8773b8ea68ad99d9eee8c8343bef9da2c2c.
> 
> If you try reverting that I expect the "hotplug CPUs" disappear.
> 
>>
>> But that should not matter at all because the system scaling should be
>> sufficient with 8 CPUs, but it does not for some completely non-obvious
>> reasons.
>>
>> Can you please try to increase possible_cpus=N on the command line one
>> by one and check when it actually starts to "work" again.
>>
>> One other thing to try is to boot with 'possible_cpus=8' and
>> 'intremap=off' and see whether that makes a difference.
>>
>> I really have no idea where to look and not having the early boot
>> messages in case of the fail is not helpful as I can't add meaningful
>> debug to it.
>>
>> I just checked: the motherboard has a serial port, so it would be
>> extremly helpful to hook up a serial cable to this thing and enable
>> serial console on the kernel command line. That way we might eventually
>> see information which is emitted before it fails to validate the timer
>> interrupt.
>>

--
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