Re: ARM BCM53573 SoC hangs/lockups caused by locks/clock/random changes

[Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>]

On 9/5/23 16:07, Florian Fainelli wrote:
>
>
> On 9/4/2023 8:40 AM, Russell King (Oracle) wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 04, 2023 at 11:25:57AM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
>>>
>>> On 9/4/23 04:33, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
>>>> As those hangs/lockups are related to so many different changes it's
>>>> really hard to debug them.
>>>>
>>>> This bug seems to be specific to the slow arch clock that affects
>>>> stability only when kernel locking code and symbols layout trigger 
>>>> some
>>>> very specific timing.
>>>>
>>>> Enabling CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING seems to make issue go away but it 
>>>> affects
>>>> so much code it's hard to tell why it actually matters.
>>>>
>>>> Same for disabling CONFIG_SMP. I noticed Broadcom's SDK keeps it
>>>> disabled. I tried it and it improves stability (I had 3 devices with 6
>>>> days of uptime and counting) indeed. Again it affects a lot of kernel
>>>> parts so it's hard to tell why it helps.
>>>>
>>>> Unless someone comes up with some magic solution I'll probably try
>>>> building BCM53573 images without CONFIG_SMP for my personal needs.
>>>
>>> All the locking operations rely on the fact that the instruction to 
>>> acquire
>>> or release a lock is atomic. Is it possible that it may not be the case
>>> under certain circumstances for this ARM BCM53573 SoC? Or maybe some 
>>> Kconfig
>>> options are not set correctly like missing some errata that are needed.
>>>
>>> I don't know enough about the 32-bit arm architecture to say whether 
>>> this is
>>> the case or not, but that is my best guess.
>>
>> So, BCM53573 is Cortex-A7, which is ARMv7, which has the exclusive
>> load/store instructions. Whether the SoC has the necessary exclusive
>> monitors to support these instructions is another matter, and I
>> suspect someone with documentation would need to check that.
>
> Finding documentation about this SoC has been very difficult 
> unfortunately...
>
> Would any of the lock or mutex debugging self test catch hardware 
> designed without proper support for exclusive monitors in the DRAM 
> controller? Keep in mind this is an uni-processor system however, does 
> that mean we may have issues in our SMP_ON_UP alternative patching?

Usually this kind of locking problem is timing related and it happens 
once in a while. It is not easy to have a test to reliably figure out if 
there is a problem. I am not sure about the SMP_ON_UP thing.

Cheers,
Longman