[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Will Deacon]

Hi all,

Sorry for the late reply, it seems that neither myself or the
arm-linux-kernel list were on CC for this thread.

On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 04:51:31AM +0000, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Jan 2015, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > I encourage you *not* to back down like this.  Linus is right in so far
> > as the regressions issue, but he is *totally* wrong to do the revert,
> > which IMHO has been done out of nothing more than spite.
> > 
> > Either *with or without* the revert, the issue still remains, and needs
> > to be addressed properly.
> > 
> > With the revert in place, we now have insanely small bogomips values
> > reported via /proc/cpuinfo when hardware timers are used.  That needs
> > fixing.
> 
> Here's my take on it.  Taking a step back, it was stupid to mix bogomips 
> with timer based delays.

Well, bogomips is directly related to loops_per_jiffy so I don't think the
mechanism is "stupid"; the issue is that userspace makes assumptions
(bogus or otherwise) about the relation of bogomips to cpu frequency which
have historically been good enough. More below...

> ----- >8
> From: Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>
> Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2015 22:28:58 -0500
> Subject: [PATCH] ARM: disentangle timer based delays and bogomips calibration
> 
> The bogomips value is a pseudo CPU speed value originally used to calibrate
> loop-based small delays.  It is also exported to user space through the
> /proc filesystem and some user space apps started relying on it.
> 
> Modern hardware can vary their CPU clock at run time making the bogomips
> value less reliable for delay purposes. With the advent of high resolution
> timers, small delays migrated to timer polling loops instead.  Strangely
> enough, the bogomips value calibration became timer based too, making it
> way more bogus than it already was as a CPU speed representation and people
> using it via /proc/cpuinfo started complaining.

As you pointed out previously, these complaints were what prompted us to
revisit the bogomips reporting. The class of application using the value
was very much things like "How fast is my AwesomePhone-9000?":

  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.securiteinfo.android.bogomips&hl=en_GB
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/byobu/+bug/675442

so actually, having *these* applications either exit early with an
"unable to calculate CPU frequency" message or print something like "CPU
freq: unknown" is arguably the right thing to do. What Pavel is now
reporting is different; some useful piece of software has lost core
functionality.

Now, even with the loop-based bogomips values we have the following
(user-visible) problems:

  (1) It's not portable between microarchitectures (for example, some
      CPUs can give you double the value if they predict the backwards
      branch in the calibration loop)

  (2) It's not reliable in the face of frequency scaling

  (3) It's not reliable in the face of heterogeneous systems (big.LITTLE)

  (4) The lpj calculation is susceptible to overflow, limiting the maximum
      delay value depending on the CPU performance

Essentially, the value is only really useful on relatively low-clocked,
in-order, uniprocessor systems (like the one where Pavel reported the bug).

> Since it was wrong for user space to rely on a "bogus" mips value to start
> with, the initial responce from kernel people was to remove it.  This broke
> user space even more as some applications then refused to run altogether.
> The bogomips export was therefore reinstated in commit 4bf9636c39 ("Revert
> 'ARM: 7830/1: delay: don't bother reporting bogomips in /proc/cpuinfo'").

Actually, our initial response was to report a dummy value iirc. I remember
even making it selectable in kconfig, but it bordered on the absurd. It's
worth noting that, with the current revert in place, the value reported
is now basically selectable via the "clock-frequency" property on the
arch_timer node for systems using the timer implementation.

> Because the reported bogomips is orders of magnitude away from the
> traditionally expected value for a given CPU when timer based delays are
> in use, and because lumping bogomips and timer based delay loops is rather
> senseless anyway, let's calibrate bogomips using a CPU loop all the time
> even when timer based delays are available.  Timer based delays don't
> need any calibration and /proc/cpuinfo will provide somewhat sensible
> values again.
> 
> In practice, calls to __delay() will now always use the CPU based loop.
> Things remain unchanged for udelay() and its derivatives.

Given that we have a hard limit of 3355 bogomips in our calibration code,
could we not just report that instead? We already have all of the issues I
highlighted above and the systems that are going to be hit by this are the
more recent (more performant) cores that will be approaching this maximum
value anyway.

We also need something we can port to the arm64 compat layer, so a constant
would be easier there too, doesn't require the calibration delay at boot
and doesn't break __delay.

One thing we're missing from all of this is what happens if Pavel's testcase
is executed on a system using a timer-backed delay? If the program chokes
on the next line anyway, then we could consider only advertising the
bogomips line when the loop-based delay is in use.

Pavel: do you have something we can run to observe the problem?

Finally, the revert doesn't have a Cc stable tag which is probably needed
if it's going to land in 3.19 final, irrespective of whether we agree that
it's the right way forward.

Will

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Will Deacon]

Hi Ted,

On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 01:34:36AM +0000, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 09:26:59PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > 
> > With the revert in place, we now have insanely small bogomips values
> > reported via /proc/cpuinfo when hardware timers are used.  That needs
> > fixing.
> 
> Why does it need to be fixed?
> 
> It's clear that there are applications that are working OK with the
> existing value,

I'm not sure it is that clear -- the reported regression was on a processor
that doesn't use the timer-backed delay loop, so the bogomips value will
essentially be restored by reverting the patch.

The issue comes on newer CPUs, where there will now be a very small bogomips
value reported and (to my knowledge) nobody has yet tried running some
affected applications there to see if they can cope.

> and if you change it to fix it for some new applications, but it breaks
> for others, then have you considered defining a new interface (perhaps
> exported via sysfs) that exports a "sane" value and document that new
> applications shoud use the new interface.
> 
> Or if the answer is that no one should be using the bogomips field at
> all, then just document *that*, and then leave it be, so that existing
> applications don't break.

It never hurts to document our assumptions or anticipated/preferred use-cases
but in this case I think bogomips is difficult enough to use on any
half-recent SoCs that most developers have either (a) found another way to
do what they want (perf counters, clock_gettime) or (b) stopped bothering to
guess the CPU frequency when it's not actually needed, so I don't *think*
that new applications are such an issue.

Cheers,

Will

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Pavel Machek]

On Mon 2015-01-05 12:11:36, Will Deacon wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Sorry for the late reply, it seems that neither myself or the
> arm-linux-kernel list were on CC for this thread.

Sorry about that. I was pretty sure I cc-ed you, but apparently did
not.

> Pavel: do you have something we can run to observe the problem?

Debian 7.7: mpg123, anything pyaudio based, at least. (install
python-pyaudio, try to run examples).

I hit it with:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Written by Yu-Jie Lin
# Public Domain
#
# Deps: PyAudio, NumPy, and Matplotlib
# Blog:
# http://blog.yjl.im/2012/11/frequency-spectrum-of-sound-using.html

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation as animation
import pyaudio
import struct
import wave
...

When I decided to investigate.

> Finally, the revert doesn't have a Cc stable tag which is probably needed
> if it's going to land in 3.19 final, irrespective of whether we agree that
> it's the right way forward.

Yes, pushing is to stable is good idea. Will you take care?

Thanks,
									Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Mon, 5 Jan 2015, Will Deacon wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 04:51:31AM +0000, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > On Sun, 4 Jan 2015, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > > I encourage you *not* to back down like this.  Linus is right in so far
> > > as the regressions issue, but he is *totally* wrong to do the revert,
> > > which IMHO has been done out of nothing more than spite.
> > > 
> > > Either *with or without* the revert, the issue still remains, and needs
> > > to be addressed properly.
> > > 
> > > With the revert in place, we now have insanely small bogomips values
> > > reported via /proc/cpuinfo when hardware timers are used.  That needs
> > > fixing.
> > 
> > Here's my take on it.  Taking a step back, it was stupid to mix bogomips 
> > with timer based delays.
> 
> Well, bogomips is directly related to loops_per_jiffy so I don't think the
> mechanism is "stupid";

It is stupid to use loops_per_jiffy for timer based delay loops.  The 
timer based loop simply polls the timer until the desired time has 
passed.  Adding a loop count on top is completely artificial (may be 
justified to avoid timer wraparounds) but bares no relationship with 
loops_per_jiffy. Therefore determining loops_per_jiffy based on a timer 
frequency is wrong.

> the issue is that userspace makes assumptions
> (bogus or otherwise) about the relation of bogomips to cpu frequency which
> have historically been good enough. More below...

Absolutely.  And that's what my patch is all about: restoring that "good 
enough" for user space (mis)purpose.

> > ----- >8
> > From: Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>
> > Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2015 22:28:58 -0500
> > Subject: [PATCH] ARM: disentangle timer based delays and bogomips calibration
> > 
> > The bogomips value is a pseudo CPU speed value originally used to calibrate
> > loop-based small delays.  It is also exported to user space through the
> > /proc filesystem and some user space apps started relying on it.
> > 
> > Modern hardware can vary their CPU clock at run time making the bogomips
> > value less reliable for delay purposes. With the advent of high resolution
> > timers, small delays migrated to timer polling loops instead.  Strangely
> > enough, the bogomips value calibration became timer based too, making it
> > way more bogus than it already was as a CPU speed representation and people
> > using it via /proc/cpuinfo started complaining.
> 
> As you pointed out previously, these complaints were what prompted us to
> revisit the bogomips reporting. The class of application using the value
> was very much things like "How fast is my AwesomePhone-9000?":
> 
>   https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.securiteinfo.android.bogomips&hl=en_GB
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/byobu/+bug/675442
> 
> so actually, having *these* applications either exit early with an
> "unable to calculate CPU frequency" message or print something like "CPU
> freq: unknown" is arguably the right thing to do.

Don't you dare!  Linus will shut you up. The sacred rule: "We don't 
break user space, period" irrespective of the nefarious application 
purpose for bogomips.

> What Pavel is now reporting is different; some useful piece of 
> software has lost core functionality.
> 
> Now, even with the loop-based bogomips values we have the following
> (user-visible) problems:
> 
>   (1) It's not portable between microarchitectures (for example, some
>       CPUs can give you double the value if they predict the backwards
>       branch in the calibration loop)

Who cares?

>   (2) It's not reliable in the face of frequency scaling

loops_per_jiffy is already scaled accordingly.  Sure it is racy but 
that's what non timer based delay loop using platforms have to live with 
already.  For /proc/cpuinfo purposes that ought to be more than good 
enough.  The MHz on X86 that some applications use in place of the 
bogomips when available has the same issue.

>   (3) It's not reliable in the face of heterogeneous systems (big.LITTLE)

Actually, it is.  With my patch I do get different values in 
/proc/cpuinfo for the A15's and the A7's which is kind of expected.

>   (4) The lpj calculation is susceptible to overflow, limiting the maximum
>       delay value depending on the CPU performance

That's an orthogonal issue that can be fixed separately.

> Essentially, the value is only really useful on relatively low-clocked,
> in-order, uniprocessor systems (like the one where Pavel reported the bug).

Sure.  Still on other systems it is some kind of ballpark figure that 
prevents applications from breaking.

> > Since it was wrong for user space to rely on a "bogus" mips value to start
> > with, the initial responce from kernel people was to remove it.  This broke
> > user space even more as some applications then refused to run altogether.
> > The bogomips export was therefore reinstated in commit 4bf9636c39 ("Revert
> > 'ARM: 7830/1: delay: don't bother reporting bogomips in /proc/cpuinfo'").
> 
> Actually, our initial response was to report a dummy value iirc. I remember
> even making it selectable in kconfig, but it bordered on the absurd. It's
> worth noting that, with the current revert in place, the value reported
> is now basically selectable via the "clock-frequency" property on the
> arch_timer node for systems using the timer implementation.

Which is even more absurd, hence my patch.

> > Because the reported bogomips is orders of magnitude away from the
> > traditionally expected value for a given CPU when timer based delays are
> > in use, and because lumping bogomips and timer based delay loops is rather
> > senseless anyway, let's calibrate bogomips using a CPU loop all the time
> > even when timer based delays are available.  Timer based delays don't
> > need any calibration and /proc/cpuinfo will provide somewhat sensible
> > values again.
> > 
> > In practice, calls to __delay() will now always use the CPU based loop.
> > Things remain unchanged for udelay() and its derivatives.
> 
> Given that we have a hard limit of 3355 bogomips in our calibration code,
> could we not just report that instead? We already have all of the issues I
> highlighted above and the systems that are going to be hit by this are the
> more recent (more performant) cores that will be approaching this maximum
> value anyway.

I suggested 1.00 before in this thread.  I also asked if 10, 100 or 1000 
were any better. Apparently none of them were.  The least controvertial 
value is certainly a runtime determined one.  The hard limit is 
a rather weak excuse that can be fixed.

> We also need something we can port to the arm64 compat layer, so a constant
> would be easier there too, doesn't require the calibration delay at boot
> and doesn't break __delay.

That's a weak excuse too.

> One thing we're missing from all of this is what happens if Pavel's testcase
> is executed on a system using a timer-backed delay? If the program chokes
> on the next line anyway, then we could consider only advertising the
> bogomips line when the loop-based delay is in use.

Won't fix the current user space issue on timer-based-delay systems so 
this brings no good.



Nicolas

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Mon, 5 Jan 2015, Will Deacon wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 04:51:31AM +0000, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > Because the reported bogomips is orders of magnitude away from the
> > traditionally expected value for a given CPU when timer based delays are
> > in use, and because lumping bogomips and timer based delay loops is rather
> > senseless anyway, let's calibrate bogomips using a CPU loop all the time
> > even when timer based delays are available.  Timer based delays don't
> > need any calibration and /proc/cpuinfo will provide somewhat sensible
> > values again.
> > 
> > In practice, calls to __delay() will now always use the CPU based loop.
> > Things remain unchanged for udelay() and its derivatives.
> 
> Given that we have a hard limit of 3355 bogomips in our calibration code,
> could we not just report that instead? We already have all of the issues I
> highlighted above and the systems that are going to be hit by this are the
> more recent (more performant) cores that will be approaching this maximum
> value anyway.

I already replied to the other issues in my previous email.

Now here's the bogomips hard limit gone:

----- >8
From: Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2015 22:43:56 -0500
Subject: [PATCH] ARM: loop_udelay: remove bogomips value limitation

Now that we don't support ARMv3 anymore, the loop based delay code can
convert microsecs into number of loops using a 64-bit multiplication.
This allows us to lift the hard limit of 3355 on the bogomips value with
loops_per_jiffy that can safely span the full 32-bit range.

Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@linaro.org>

diff --git a/arch/arm/include/asm/delay.h b/arch/arm/include/asm/delay.h
index 7feeb163f5..287c96ad93 100644
--- a/arch/arm/include/asm/delay.h
+++ b/arch/arm/include/asm/delay.h
@@ -10,8 +10,8 @@
 #include <asm/param.h>	/* HZ */
 
 #define MAX_UDELAY_MS	2
-#define UDELAY_MULT	((UL(2199023) * HZ) >> 11)
-#define UDELAY_SHIFT	30
+#define UDELAY_MULT	UL(2047 * HZ + 483648 * HZ / 1000000)
+#define UDELAY_SHIFT	31
 
 #ifndef __ASSEMBLY__
 
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ extern struct arm_delay_ops {
  * it, it means that you're calling udelay() with an out of range value.
  *
  * With currently imposed limits, this means that we support a max delay
- * of 2000us. Further limits: HZ<=1000 and bogomips<=3355
+ * of 2000us. Further limits: HZ<=1000
  */
 extern void __bad_udelay(void);
 
diff --git a/arch/arm/lib/delay-loop.S b/arch/arm/lib/delay-loop.S
index 518bf6e93f..bcc23c5760 100644
--- a/arch/arm/lib/delay-loop.S
+++ b/arch/arm/lib/delay-loop.S
@@ -17,7 +17,6 @@
 
 /*
  * r0  <= 2000
- * lpj <= 0x01ffffff (max. 3355 bogomips)
  * HZ  <= 1000
  */
 
@@ -25,16 +24,11 @@ ENTRY(__loop_udelay)
 		ldr	r2, .LC1
 		mul	r0, r2, r0
 ENTRY(__loop_const_udelay)			@ 0 <= r0 <= 0x7fffff06
-		mov	r1, #-1
 		ldr	r2, .LC0
-		ldr	r2, [r2]		@ max = 0x01ffffff
-		add	r0, r0, r1, lsr #32-14
-		mov	r0, r0, lsr #14		@ max = 0x0001ffff
-		add	r2, r2, r1, lsr #32-10
-		mov	r2, r2, lsr #10		@ max = 0x00007fff
-		mul	r0, r2, r0		@ max = 2^32-1
-		add	r0, r0, r1, lsr #32-6
-		movs	r0, r0, lsr #6
+		ldr	r2, [r2]
+		umull	r1, r0, r2, r0
+		adds	r1, r1, #0xffffffff
+		adcs	r0, r0, r0
 		reteq	lr
 
 /*

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Monday 05 January 2015 23:09:00 Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> 
> Now here's the bogomips hard limit gone:
> 
> ----- >8
> From: Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>
> Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2015 22:43:56 -0500
> Subject: [PATCH] ARM: loop_udelay: remove bogomips value limitation
> 
> Now that we don't support ARMv3 anymore, the loop based delay code can
> convert microsecs into number of loops using a 64-bit multiplication.
> This allows us to lift the hard limit of 3355 on the bogomips value with
> loops_per_jiffy that can safely span the full 32-bit range.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@linaro.org>

I think we still build RPC with gcc -march=armv3. Is that a problem
with this patch?

	Arnd

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2015, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

> On Monday 05 January 2015 23:09:00 Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > 
> > Now here's the bogomips hard limit gone:
> > 
> > ----- >8
> > From: Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>
> > Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2015 22:43:56 -0500
> > Subject: [PATCH] ARM: loop_udelay: remove bogomips value limitation
> > 
> > Now that we don't support ARMv3 anymore, the loop based delay code can
> > convert microsecs into number of loops using a 64-bit multiplication.
> > This allows us to lift the hard limit of 3355 on the bogomips value with
> > loops_per_jiffy that can safely span the full 32-bit range.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@linaro.org>
> 
> I think we still build RPC with gcc -march=armv3. Is that a problem
> with this patch?

It is.

Tangential question: does anyone still own a working RPC?

For sure we no longer support the RPC unless it is fitted with a SA110.  
And IIRC the reason why -march=armv3 is used in that case has to do with 
the RPC memory bus not able to accommodate the SA110's LDRH/STRH 
instructions. However it should be able to execute UMULL regardless.

Now I could add ".arch armv7-a" in the file to make it compile for RPC.  
I can't just make it ".arch armv4" as this prevents Thumb2 compilation 
for that file.

Other ideas?


Nicolas

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2015, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Jan 2015, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> 
> > I think we still build RPC with gcc -march=armv3. Is that a problem
> > with this patch?
> 
> It is.
> 
> Tangential question: does anyone still own a working RPC?
> 
> For sure we no longer support the RPC unless it is fitted with a SA110.  
> And IIRC the reason why -march=armv3 is used in that case has to do with 
> the RPC memory bus not able to accommodate the SA110's LDRH/STRH 
> instructions. However it should be able to execute UMULL regardless.
> 
> Now I could add ".arch armv7-a" in the file to make it compile for RPC.  
> I can't just make it ".arch armv4" as this prevents Thumb2 compilation 
> for that file.
> 
> Other ideas?

I settled on the following:

diff --git a/arch/arm/lib/Makefile b/arch/arm/lib/Makefile
index 0573faab96..0eb8de1c6f 100644
--- a/arch/arm/lib/Makefile
+++ b/arch/arm/lib/Makefile
@@ -40,7 +40,10 @@ else
   lib-y	+= io-readsw-armv4.o io-writesw-armv4.o
 endif
 
-lib-$(CONFIG_ARCH_RPC)		+= ecard.o io-acorn.o floppydma.o
+ifeq ($(CONFIG_ARCH_RPC),y)
+  lib-y				+= ecard.o io-acorn.o floppydma.o
+  AFLAGS_delay-loop.o		+= -march=armv4
+endif
 
 $(obj)/csumpartialcopy.o:	$(obj)/csumpartialcopygeneric.S
 $(obj)/csumpartialcopyuser.o:	$(obj)/csumpartialcopygeneric.S

That'll make things easier to sort out in the context of 
$tangential_question.


Nicolas

[PATCH] Revert 9fc2105aeaaf56b0cf75296a84702d0f9e64437b to fix pyaudio (and probably more)

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Tuesday 06 January 2015 16:27:05 Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> Tangential question: does anyone still own a working RPC?

I'm pretty sure that Russell still has one. As far as I know there
are quite a lot of RPC in working condition, but most of them are
running RiscOS.

> -lib-$(CONFIG_ARCH_RPC)         += ecard.o io-acorn.o floppydma.o
> +ifeq ($(CONFIG_ARCH_RPC),y)
> +  lib-y                                += ecard.o io-acorn.o floppydma.o
> +  AFLAGS_delay-loop.o          += -march=armv4
> +endif

Looks good to me.

	Arnd