Re: [PATCH] cpuidle: warn and fixup on sanity check instead of rejecting the driver

[Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>]

On Thu, 2025-11-20 at 22:06 -0300, Val Packett wrote:
> On Device Tree platforms, the latency and target residency values come
> directly from device trees, which are numerous and weren't all written
> with cpuidle invariants in mind. For example, qcom/hamoa.dtsi currently
> trips this check: exit latency 680000 > residency 600000.
> 
> Instead of harshly rejecting the entire cpuidle driver with a mysterious
> error message, print a warning and set the target residency value to be
> equal to the exit latency.
> 
> Fixes: 76934e495cdc ("cpuidle: Add sanity check for exit latency and target residency")
> Signed-off-by: Val Packett <val@packett.cool>
> ---
>  drivers/cpuidle/driver.c | 7 +++++--
>  1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/drivers/cpuidle/driver.c b/drivers/cpuidle/driver.c
> index 1c295a93d582..06aeb59c1017 100644
> --- a/drivers/cpuidle/driver.c
> +++ b/drivers/cpuidle/driver.c
> @@ -199,8 +199,11 @@ static int __cpuidle_driver_init(struct cpuidle_driver *drv)
>  		 * exceed its target residency which is assumed in cpuidle in
>  		 * multiple places.
>  		 */
> -		if (s->exit_latency_ns > s->target_residency_ns)
> -			return -EINVAL;
> +		if (s->exit_latency_ns > s->target_residency_ns) {
> +			pr_warn("cpuidle: state %d: exit latency %lld > residency %lld (fixing)\n",
> +				i, s->exit_latency_ns, s->target_residency_ns);
> +			s->target_residency_ns = s->exit_latency_ns;
> +		}
>  	}

Ideally, in a perfect world, driver.c should verify input data and
reject bad input, rather than correct bad input.

So ideally, if there is an idle driver between DT and driver.c (like
intel_idle.c in case of Intel), that would be its job to correct DT
data.

But I'm not familiar with DT platforms, so I don't know if there is a
driver/piece of SW between DT parsing and driver.c that could handle
this correction at an earlier stage.

The reason I think this patch is not ideal is because it changes the
input data at the core framework level, and in theory the change may be
surprising to users. In general, sometimes rejecting bluntly is better
than correcting in a possibly unexpected way.

Artem.