Re: [PATCH 0/2] Add support for Gunyah Watchdog

[Rob Herring <robh@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 6:31 AM Konrad Dybcio
<konrad.dybcio@oss.qualcomm.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/4/25 2:10 AM, Rob Herring wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 03, 2025 at 07:33:58PM +0000, Hrishabh Rajput wrote:
> >> Gunyah is a Type-I hypervisor which was introduced in the patch series
> >> [1]. It is an open source hypervisor. The source repo is available at
> >> [2].
> >>
> >> The Gunyah Hypervisor doesn't allow its Virtual Machines to directly
> >> access the MMIO watchdog. It either provides the fully emulated MMIO
> >> based watchdog interface or the SMC-based watchdog interface depending
> >> on the hypervisor configuration.
> >
> > EFI provides a standard watchdog interface. Why can't you use that?
>
> The use of UEFI at Qualcomm is not exactly what you would expect..
>
> >
> >> The SMC-based watchdog follows ARM's SMC Calling Convention (SMCCC)
> >> version 1.1 and uses Vendor Specific Hypervisor Service Calls space.
> >
> > Is a watchdog really a hypervisor service? Couldn't a non-virtualized
> > OS want to call a watchdog (in secure mode) as well? But I don't know
> > how the SMCCC call space is divided up...
>
> Gunyah traps SMC calls and acts on a subset of them, passing others
> to TZ

My question was just whether it's the right call space to use. I would
think hypervisor calls would be things like "vm start" or "vm stop",
not something which in theory could be implemented without a
hypervisor in the middle.

> >> This patch series adds support for the SMC-based watchdog interface
> >> provided by the Gunyah Hypervisor. The driver supports start/stop
> >> operations, timeout and pretimeout configuration, pretimeout interrupt
> >> handling and system restart via watchdog.
> >
> > Shouldn't system restart be handled by PSCI?
>
> I believe the author is trying to say that the watchdog is not
> configurable from Linux at present, and if the platform hangs, there
> are some indeterminate default settings in place
>
> >
> > Why can't you probe by trying to see if watchdog smc call succeeds to
> > see if there is a watchdog? Then you don't need DT for it.
>
> There apparently isn't a good way to tell from a running system whether
> Gunyah is present, unless you make a smc call (which could in theory be
> parsed by something else, say a different hypervisor..), but then this
> patch only introduces the watchdog interface, without all the cruft that
> would actually let us identify the hypervisor, get its version ID and
> perform sanity checks..

IIRC, last time we got just a gunyah node. Now it's that plus a
watchdog. What's next? I'm not really a fan of $soc_vendor hypervisor
interfaces. I doubt anyone else is either. We have all sorts of
standard interfaces already between virtio, vfio, EFI, SCMI, PSCI,
etc. Can we please not abuse DT with $soc_vendor hypervisor devices.

Rob