Re: [PATCH v3 09/21] arm64: cpufeature: Add global feature override facility

Srinivas Ramana
2021-01-11T20:40:08Z

Hi Catalin,

On 1/11/2021 10:41 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> Hi Marc,
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 01:27:59PM +0000, Marc Zyngier wrote:
>> Add a facility to globally override a feature, no matter what
>> the HW says. Yes, this is dangerous.
> Yeah, it's dangerous. We can make it less so if we only allow safe
> values (e.g. lower if FTR_UNSIGNED).
>
>> diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/cpufeature.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/cpufeature.h
>> index 9a555809b89c..465d2cb63bfc 100644
>> --- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/cpufeature.h
>> +++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/cpufeature.h
>> @@ -75,6 +75,8 @@ struct arm64_ftr_reg {
>> u64 sys_val;
>> u64 user_val;
>> const struct arm64_ftr_bits *ftr_bits;
>> + u64 *override_val;
>> + u64 *override_mask;
>> };
> At the arm64_ftr_reg level, we don't have any information about the safe
> values for a feature. Could we instead move this to arm64_ftr_bits? We
> probably only need a single field. When populating the feature values,
> we can make sure it doesn't go above the hardware one.
>
> I attempted a feature modification for MTE here, though I dropped the
> entire series in the meantime as we clarified the ARM ARM:
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/20200515171612.1020-24-catalin.marinas@arm.com/
>
> Srinivas copied it in his patch (but forgot to give credit ;)):

Sorry about that. I did mention that its taken from your patch-set in my
cover letter. But missed your signed-off-by in the patch.

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-msm/6dfdf691b5ed57df81c4c61422949af5@misterjones.org/T/#m1ae76e6096c07ab5f1636a4e383a3fd6cfb4665f

Since we can ignore my patch with the mechanism added by Marc, I am not
re-sending this. Thanks.

>
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-msm/1610152163-16554-3-git-send-email-sramana@codeaurora.org/
>
> The above adds a filter function but, instead, just use your mechanism in
> this series for idreg.feature setting via cmdline. The arm64_ftr_value()
> function extracts the hardware value and lowers it if a cmdline argument
> was passed.
>