Re: [PATCH] tty: pl011: Avoid spuriously stuck-off interrupts

Russell King - ARM Linux
2018-05-08T11:01:19Z

On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 11:05:45AM +0100, Dave Martin wrote:
> Commit 9b96fbacda34 ("serial: PL011: clear pending interrupts")
> clears the RX and receive timeout interrupts on pl011 startup, to
> avoid a screaming-interrupt scenario that can occur when the
> firmware or bootloader leaves these interrupts asserted.
>
> This has been noted as an issue when running Linux on qemu [1].
>
> Unfortunately, the above fix seems to lead to potential
> misbehaviour if the RX FIFO interrupt is asserted _non_ spuriously
> on driver startup, if the RX FIFO is also already full to the
> trigger level.
>
> Clearing the RX FIFO interrupt does not change the FIFO fill level.
> In this scenario, because the interrupt is now clear and because
> the FIFO is already full to the trigger level, no new assertion of
> the RX FIFO interrupt can occur unless the FIFO is drained back
> below the trigger level. This never occurs because the pl011
> driver is waiting for an RX FIFO interrupt to tell it that there is
> something to read, and does not read the FIFO at all until that
> interrupt occurs.
>
> Thus, simply clearing "spurious" interrupts on startup may be
> misguided, since there is no way to be sure that the interrupts are
> truly spurious, and things can go wrong if they are not.
>
> This patch instead clears the interrupt condition by draining the
> RX FIFO during UART startup, after clearing any potentially
> spurious interrupt. This should ensure that an interrupt will
> definitely be asserted if the RX FIFO subsequently becomes
> sufficiently full.
>
> The drain is done at the point of enabling interrupts only. This
> means that it will occur any time the UART is newly opened through
> the tty layer. It will not apply to polled-mode use of the UART by
> kgdboc: since that scenario cannot use interrupts by design, this
> should not matter. kgdboc will interact badly with "normal" use of
> the UART in any case: this patch makes no attempt to paper over
> such issues.
>
> This patch does not attempt to address the case where the RX FIFO
> fills faster than it can be drained: that is a pathological
> hardware design problem that is beyond the scope of the driver to
> work around.
>
> [1] [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-arm] [PATCH] pl011: do not put into fifo
> before enabled the interruption
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2018-01/msg06446.html
>
> Reported-by: Wei Xu <xuwei5@hisilicon.com>
> Cc: Russell King <linux@armlinux.org.uk>
> Cc: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>
> Cc: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
> Fixes: 9b96fbacda34 ("serial: PL011: clear pending interrupts")
> Signed-off-by: Dave Martin <Dave.Martin@arm.com>
> Tested-by: Andrew Jones <drjones@redhat.com>
> Reviewed-by: Andrew Jones <drjones@redhat.com>
> ---
> drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c | 10 ++++++++++
> 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c b/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c
> index 4b40a5b..a6ccb85 100644
> --- a/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c
> +++ b/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c
> @@ -1731,6 +1731,16 @@ static void pl011_enable_interrupts(struct uart_amba_port *uap)
>
> /* Clear out any spuriously appearing RX interrupts */
> pl011_write(UART011_RTIS | UART011_RXIS, uap, REG_ICR);
> +
> + /*
> + * RXIS is asserted only when the RX FIFO transitions from below
> + * to above the trigger threshold. If the RX FIFO is already
> + * full to the threshold this can't happen and RXIS will now be
> + * stuck off. Drain the RX FIFO explicitly to fix this:
> + */
> + while (!(pl011_read(uap, REG_FR) & UART01x_FR_RXFE))
> + pl011_read(uap, REG_DR);

You probably ought to limit this in case of a stuck receive not empty
case, maybe to (eg) twice the depth of the FIFO?

--
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