Re: [PATCH v20 08/17] clocksource/drivers/arm_arch_timer: Rework counter frequency detection.

Mark Rutland
2017-01-25T17:36:11Z

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 10:38:01AM -0500, Christopher Covington wrote:
> On 01/25/2017 01:46 AM, Fu Wei wrote:
> > On 25 January 2017 at 01:24, Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com> wrote:
> >> On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 09:25:32PM +0800, fu.wei@linaro.org wrote:
> >>> From: Fu Wei <fu.wei@linaro.org>

> > And for CNTFRQ(in CNTCTLBase and CNTBaseN) , we can NOT access it in
> > Linux kernel (EL1),
> > Because ARMv8 ARM says:
> > In a system that implements both Secure and Non-secure states, this
> > register is only accessible by Secure accesses.
> > That means we still need to get the frequency of the system counter
> > from CNTFRQ_EL0 in MMIO timer code.
> > This have been proved when I tested this driver on foundation model, I
> > got "0" when I access CNTFRQ from Linux kernel (Non-secure EL1)
>
> That sounds like a firmware problem. Firmware in EL3 is supposed to write
> the value into CNTFRQ.

Definitely. FW *should* program the CNTFRQ_EL0 CPU registers and any
MMIO CNTFRQ registers.

> If you're not currently using any firmware, I'd
> recommend the bootwrapper on models/simulators/emulators.
>
> http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/mark/boot-wrapper-aarch64.git/tree/arch/aarch64/boot.S#n48

Unfortunately, the boot-wrapper only programs the CNTFRQ_EL0 CPU system
registers, and does not program any MMIO CNTFRQ registers.

IIRC the models it was originally written for didn't have any (and we
had no DT binding until far later...). Luckily the model DTs do not
expose any MMIO timer addresses to the kernel currently.

Thanks,
Mark.