Re: RFC: outb 0x80 in inb_p, outb_p harmful on some modern AMD64 with MCP51 laptops

Rene Herman
2007-12-07T05:10:32Z

On 07-12-07 01:23, Robert Hancock wrote:

> David P. Reed wrote:
>> After much, much testing (months, off and on, pursuing hypotheses),
>> I've discovered that the use of "outb al,0x80" instructions to "delay"
>> after inb and outb instructions causes solid freezes on my HP dv9000z
>> laptop, when ACPI is enabled.
>>
>> It takes a fair number of out's to 0x80, but the hard freeze is
>> reliably reproducible by writing a driver that solely does a loop of
>> 50 outb's to 0x80 and calling it in a loop 1000 times from user
>> space. !!!
>>
>> The serious impact is that the /dev/rtc and /dev/nvram devices are
>> very unreliable - thus "hwclock" freezes very reliably while looping
>> waiting for a new second value and calling "cat /dev/nvram" in a loop
>> freezes the machine if done a few times in a row.
>>
>> This is reproducible, but requires a fair number of outb's to the 0x80
>> diagnostic port, and seems to require ACPI to be on.
>>
>> io_64.h is the source of these particular instructions, via the
>> CMOS_READ and CMOS_WRITE macros, which are defined in mc146818_64.h.
>> (I wonder if the same problem occurs in 32-bit mode).
>>
>> I'm happy to complete and test a patch, but I'm curious what the right
>> approach ought to be. I have to say I have no clue as to what ACPI is
>> doing on this chipset (nvidia MCP51) that would make port 80 do
>> this. A raw random guess is that something is logging POST codes, but
>> if so, not clear what is problematic in ACPI mode.
>>
>> ANy help/suggestions?
>>
>> Changing the delay instruction sequence from the outb to short jumps
>> might be the safe thing. But Linus, et al. may have experience with
>> that on other architectures like older Pentiums etc.
>
> The fact that these "pausing" calls are needed in the first place seems
> rather cheesy. If there's hardware that's unable to respond to IO port
> writes as fast as possible, then surely there's a better solution than
> trying to stall the IOs by an arbitrary and hardware-dependent amount of
> time, like udelay calls, etc. Does any remotely recent hardware even
> need this?

The idea is that the delay is not in fact hardware dependent. With in the
the absense of a POST board port 0x80 being sort of guaranteeed to not be
decoded on PCI but forwarded to and left to die on ISA/LPC one should get
the effect that the _next_ write will have survived an ISA/LPC bus address
cycle acknowledgement timeout.

I believe.

And no, I don't believe any remotely recent hardware needs it and have in
fact wondered about it since actual 386 days, having since that time never
found a device that wouldn't in fact take back to back I/O even. Even back
then (ie, legacy only systems, no forwarding from PCI or anything) BIOSes
provided ISA bus wait-state settings which should be involved in getting
insanely stupid and old hardware to behave...

Port 0xed has been suggested as an alternate port. Probably not a great
"fix" but if replacing the out with a simple udelay() isn't that simple
(during early boot I gather) then it might at least be something for you to
try. I'd hope that the 0x80 in include/asm/io.h:native_io_delay() would be
the only one you are running into, so you could change that to 0xed and see
what catches fire.

If there are no sensible fixes, an 0x80/0xed choice could I assume be hung
of DMI or something (if that _is_ parsed soon enough).

Rene.