Re: [PATCH v5 00/16] Xen ARM DomU ACPI support

[Julien Grall <julien.grall@arm.com>]

Hi Stefano,

On 14/09/2016 21:48, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2016, Julien Grall wrote:
>> On 14/09/2016 02:06, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
>>> On Wed, 14 Sep 2016, Shannon Zhao wrote:
>>>> On 2016/9/13 23:17, Julien Grall wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 13/09/16 14:06, Shannon Zhao wrote:
>>>>>> Hi Julien,
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello Shannon,
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 2016/9/13 19:56, Julien Grall wrote:
>>>>>>> Hi Shannon,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 02/09/16 03:55, Shannon Zhao wrote:
>>>>>>>> From: Shannon Zhao <shannon.zhao@linaro.org>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> The design of this feature is described as below.
>>>>>>>> Firstly, the toolstack (libxl) generates the ACPI tables according
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> number of vcpus and gic controller.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Then, it copies these ACPI tables to DomU non-RAM memory map space
>>>>>>>> and
>>>>>>>> passes them to UEFI firmware through the "ARM multiboot" protocol.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> At last, UEFI gets the ACPI tables through the "ARM multiboot"
>>>>>>>> protocol
>>>>>>>> and installs these tables like the usual way and passes both ACPI
>>>>>>>> and DT
>>>>>>>> information to the Xen DomU.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Currently libxl only generates RSDP, XSDT, GTDT, MADT, FADT, DSDT
>>>>>>>> tables
>>>>>>>> since it's enough now.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> This has been tested using guest kernel with the Dom0 ACPI support
>>>>>>>> patches which could be fetched from linux master or:
>>>>>>>> https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/mfleming/efi.git/log/?h=efi/arm-xen
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> The UEFI binary could be fetched from or built from edk2 master
>>>>>>>> branch:
>>>>>>>> http://people.linaro.org/~shannon.zhao/DomU_ACPI/XEN_EFI.fd
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On which commit this EFI binary is based? I am trying to rebuild
>>>>>>> myself,
>>>>>>> and go no luck to boot it so far.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> I forgot the exact commit. But I just tried below commit which adds
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> support to edk2 and the guest can boot up successfully with ACPI.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 402dde6 ArmVirtPkg/ArmVirtXen: Add ACPI support for Virt Xen ARM
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks, the commit does not build on my platform. After some help for
>>>>> Ard I managed to boot UEFI with the patch [1] applied.
>>>>>
>>>>> However Linux does not boot when passing acpi=on and abort with the
>>>>> following message:
>>>>>
>>>>> (d86) 6RCU: Adjusting geometry for rcu_fanout_leaf=64, nr_cpu_ids=1
>>>>> (d86) 6NR_IRQS:64 nr_irqs:64 0
>>>>> (d86) 3No valid GICC entries exist
>>>>> (d86) 0Kernel panic - not syncing: No interrupt controller found.
>>>>> (d86) dCPU: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 4.8.0-rc6+ #420
>>>>> (d86) dHardware name: XENVM-4.8 (DT)
>>>>> (d86) Call trace:
>>>>> (d86) [<ffff000008088708>] dump_backtrace+0x0/0x1a8
>>>>> (d86) [<ffff0000080888c4>] show_stack+0x14/0x20
>>>>> (d86) [<ffff0000083d6c2c>] dump_stack+0x94/0xb8
>>>>> (d86) [<ffff00000815c24c>] panic+0x10c/0x250
>>>>> (d86) [<ffff000008c223f8>] init_IRQ+0x24/0x2c
>>>>> (d86) [<ffff000008c20a24>] start_kernel+0x238/0x394
>>>>> (d86) [<ffff000008c201bc>] __primary_switched+0x30/0x74
>>>>> (d86) 0---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: No interrupt controller
>>>>> found.
>>>>>
>>>>> This is because the header.length for GICC is not valid for ACPI 5.1
>>>>> (see BAD_MADT_GICC_ENTRY). So please check all the size of each table
>>>>> against ACPI 5.1.
>>>>>
>>>> Oops. The reason is that acpi_madt_generic_interrupt in Xen is already
>>>> updated to ACPI 6.0 and the length is 80 not 76 of ACPI 5.1.
>>>> One solution is that we still use ACPI 5.1 and make gicc->header.length
>>>> 76. Other one is that we update to ACPI 6.0 since the Xen ARM ACPI
>>>> support in Linux was introduced after ACPI 6.0.
>>>>
>>>> Which one do you prefer?
>>>
>>> Certainly the versions of all tables need to be consistent. I would
>>> prefer to have ACPI 6.0 but 5.1 is acceptable too (especially if
>>> upgrading to 6.0 causes a large amount of changes to your patches).
>>
>> I disagree on this, we should use the first version of ACPI that is fully
>> supporting ARM because a guest operating system may choose to support the
>> first one (there is a lot hardware platform out which only provides ACPI 5.1).
>
> And I thought that compatibility was supposed to be ACPI's strong suit.
> I mistakenly had the impression that new ACPI releases weren't suppose
> to break old OSes. I take back my comment, you are right that we should
> stay on 5.1 (including all the erratas, many are important for ARM).
>

IIRC, early version of ACPI used to have some incompatibility. I will 
have to go through the ACPI spec to find the main differences between 
5.1 and 6.0 for ARM.

Assuming the newer versions are backward compatible, it might be good to 
written down somewhere (maybe a public headers) that the guest OS should 
not assume a specific version of ACPI. This would avoid to tie us on 
ACPI 5.1 and allow us to upgrade the tables on a next release of Xen.

In any case, we should be consistent accross all the ACPI tables (e.g 
version, size of the tables...) to accommodate picky OSes. For now, I 
would stay on ACPI 5.1 for safety.

Regards,

-- 
Julien Grall

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