From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mark Rutland Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2014 10:29:09 +0100 Subject: [U-Boot] ARMv8 spin-table patches In-Reply-To: <20140627164405.GY9006@bill-the-cat> References: <53AD97BB.4020004@freescale.com> <20140627164405.GY9006@bill-the-cat> Message-ID: <20140704092909.GE31812@leverpostej> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: u-boot@lists.denx.de Hi, Apologies for the late reply. On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 05:44:05PM +0100, Tom Rini wrote: > On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 09:11:39AM -0700, York Sun wrote: > > > Dear Albert, Wolfgang, Tom, > > > > I have seen some patches for PSCI. We don't have PSCI enabled on > > Freescale ARMv8 SoCs. Will spin-table patches be acceptable? > > Baring some technical reasons why no, you can't do that, yes, lets see > the patches :) I'd point out that it's decidedly sub-optimal as spin-table provides no provision for CPU hotplug (which for Linux will affect kexec and other features relying on CPU hotplug support). Additionally, spin-table has the unfortunate property of allowing the firmware to throw an unbound number of CPUs into the kernel at once (when they share a cpu-release-addr), where they can spend a lot of time spinning pointlessly (executing kernel code from memory and possibly fetching it into I-caches) depending on the number of events a CPU happens to generate at runtime. Linux will continue to support spin-table, but it's far preferable to use PSCI. Another possibility raised was trying to fix spin-table to provide provisions for CPU hotplug, but I've not had the time to look into this in great detail. A while ago there were some PSCI patches for (32-bit) ARM [1]... Thanks, Mark. [1] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/maz/u-boot.git/log/?h=wip/psci-v4