Re: Debugging a weird hardware fault.

[Keir Fraser <keir.xen@gmail.com>]

Cc'ing some of the Xen ACPI/PM maintainers to see if they have an opinion on
this issue...

On 29/07/2011 08:10, "Keir Fraser" <keir.xen@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 28/07/2011 23:45, "Andrew Cooper" <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com> wrote:
> 
>> Initially, an SMI was what I was thinking, but the triple fault occurs
>> whether
>> you start bringing down CPUs or not.  While waiting 10 seconds in the
>> platform_op select statment, the fault still occurs when all CPUs are still
>> up, all IRQs still enabled and potentially domU's still up.  (Also, from
>> studying the Xen3.4 code, I believe that interrupts are still actually up
>> during time_suspend(), but are soon brought down by lapic_suspend() later in
>> device_power_down().)
>> 
>> Convertly, in the hacked up case where I ditched most of the shared S3/S5
>> codepath and just hit the PM1A, the server correctly shut down and stayed
>> shut
>> down, implying that the fault was caused by software (be it BIOS or OS)
>> rather
>> than hardware.  From what I understand of the APCI spec (and I claim very
>> little knowledge), there are a multitude of hardware events which could bring
>> the server out of S5, appearing as a triple fault, which would not be
>> affected
>> by whether you had hit the PM1A register.
>> 
>> In this specific example, dom0 regular shudown code already brought down the
>> domUs (of which there were none because we never started any), and we were
>> running with 1 CPU only so no others were up.  This opens up a whole host of
>> other possibilities which could be playing an effect betwee the
>> XENPF_enter_apci_sleep hypercall and Xen actually shutting itself down.
> 
> Well I expect dom0 has done some going-to-sleep work that has left the
> platform on borrowed time w.r.t. bashing SLP_EN into the PM1 control
> register and actually finalising the shutdown.
> 
> For example, it will have executed the _GTS ACPI method if there is one.
> That is supposed to happen immediately before writing PM1.SLP_EN, with no
> intervening interrupt activity or I/O. Obviously things don't work out quite
> like that when running on Xen!
> 
> This is an architectural limitation of how ACPI sleep is currently
> implemented for Xen. It may need some rethinking to do it really properly
> according to the spec. e.g., do a hypercall just to prepare Xen for
> shutdown, but return back to dom0 in some limited environment to actually
> have it do the final ACPI sleep work. Or have dom0 pass a pointer to a code
> block that Xen should simply jump at to get the sleep to happen (where that
> code block would basically be dom0's acpi_enter_sleep() function). There are
> a few, somewhat distasteful, options that are more respectful of the ACPI
> spec than we are right now.
> 
>  -- Keir
> 
>