Re: [PATCH] arm64: Add the arm64.nolse_atomics command line option

Will Deacon
2023-07-11T08:23:09Z

On Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 12:02:22PM +0800, Aiqun(Maria) Yu wrote:
> On 7/10/2023 5:37 PM, Will Deacon wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 10, 2023 at 01:59:55PM +0800, Maria Yu wrote:
> > > In order to be able to disable lse_atomic even if cpu
> > > support it, most likely because of memory controller
> > > cannot deal with the lse atomic instructions, use a
> > > new idreg override to deal with it.
> >
> > This should not be a problem for cacheable memory though, right?
> >
> > Given that Linux does not issue atomic operations to non-cacheable mappings,
> > I'm struggling to see why there's a problem here.
>
> The lse atomic operation can be issued on non-cacheable mappings as well.
> Even if it is cached data, with different CPUECTLR_EL1 setting, it can also
> do far lse atomic operations.

Please can you point me to the place in the kernel sources where this
happens? The architecture doesn't guarantee that atomics to non-cacheable
mappings will work, see "B2.2.6 Possible implementation restrictions on
using atomic instructions". Linux, therefore, doesn't issue atomics
to non-cacheable memory.

> > Please can you explain the problem that you are trying to solve?
>
> In our current case, it is a 100% reproducible issue that happened for
> uncached data, the cpu which support LSE atomic, but the system's DDR
> subsystem is not support this and caused a NOC error and thus synchronous
> external abort happened.

So? The Arm ARM allows this behaviour and Linux shouldn't run into it.

Will