Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v6 1/4] arm: introduce psci_smp_ops

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > > On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > > 
> > > > On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > > > > This should allow the Xen problem to be resolved, because Xen will
> > > > > provide the PSCI operations, and it's correct in that case to override
> > > > > the platform's SMP operations.
> > > > 
> > > > Yes, increasing the priority of PSCI helps Xen a lot.
> > > > In order to completely solve the issue for Xen though, another patch is
> > > > needed (http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=136630106201968&w=2) because
> > > > of the introduction of smp_init.
> > > 
> > > Please look at the latest smp_init patch version I sent to you.  It 
> > > shouldn't conflict with Xen any longer.  It now returns a bool result 
> > > depending on whether it did set up smp_ops or not.
> > 
> > CPUs are virtualized by Xen and do not reflect or expose the underlying
> > SMP hardware and firmware features, so an hardware specific smp_init
> > cannot run.
> > 
> > So the smp_init patch still breaks Xen because even if smp_init can fail
> > graciously, executing a platform specific smp_init function that tries
> > to access registers and memory regions that are not present is going to
> > cause an undefined behaviour.
> 
> It won't access hardware but just look into the DT and return false if 
> nothing interesting is found.  At which point the next attempt in the 
> priority list is PSCI by default.

OK, that should work.
I am going to drop "xen/arm: introduce xen_early_init, use PSCI on xen".

We'll have to be careful enforcing that future smp_init implementations
use DT rather than probing registers. Maybe I should add a comment to
the smp_init patch to clarify that?

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