[patch, 2.6.10-rc2] floppy boot-time detection fix

[Ingo Molnar]

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> the -RT patchset doesnt properly detect my fd0 device, so there's
> definitely something broken in that area. The unpatched -rc2-mm3
> kernel detects it fine. Might be an effect of IRQ threading - the
> floppy hardware/driver is a fragile beast.

found the bug that causes the fd detection failure. It's a generic race
in the upstream floppy driver, which happens to work by chance in the
vanilla kernel but breaks when IRQ and softirq threading is enabled:

when the FDC hardware is initialized, it sometimes generates a floppy
interrupt right away - without being told to. This interrupt can hit the
detection code that executes right after the initialization code, in
particular it can get intermixed with user_reset_fdc() that the
detection code uses. The fd driver is fundamentally single-threaded when
it comes to handling events: an unexpected irq that arrives in the wrong
moment can confuse the reset_fdc() code, which, with softirq and hardirq
threading on, executes in keventd.

in the stock kernel this stale irq doesnt seem to hit the detection code
in the wrong moment, but i think under certain circumstances it may
still happen. One of the typical incarnations of the race was the
following message:

 reset set in interrupt, calling c0258400

and googling for "reset set in interrupt, calling" does turn up a fair
number of bootlogs (most of them 2.4 ones) that show such a detection
failure, so i think upstream wants to have the fix too.

the fix is simple: delay a bit after initialization, to make sure the
stale irq does not interfere with the detection code. It will be safely
ignored, since do_floppy is still NULL. It might look sloppy that i went
for a delay, but delay i think it is better than waiting for the irq to
occur, because i dont think there's a guarantee that fdc initialization
triggers an interrupt, so waiting for it could hang the boot process. A
delay OTOH is totally harmless.

The attached patch implements this fix, which resolves the detection
problem on my testbox.

here's again how a failure looks like:

 Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
 reset set in interrupt, calling c0258400
 floppy0: no floppy controllers found

and this is how it works with the fix:

 Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
 FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077

i've tested this on vanilla 2.6.10-rc2-mm3 too (to make sure this doesnt
break the floppy driver), and it should work fine in -BK too.

(this does not solve the irq threading related SMP lockup though, i'm
attacking that problem next - now that my fd0 gets detected fine ;-) )

	Ingo

Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx>

--- linux/drivers/block/floppy.c.orig
+++ linux/drivers/block/floppy.c
@@ -4504,6 +4578,13 @@ int __init floppy_init(void)
 		floppy_track_buffer = NULL;
 		max_buffer_sectors = 0;
 	}
+	/*
+	 * Small 10 msec delay to let through any interrupt that
+	 * initialization might have triggered, to not
+	 * confuse detection:
+	 */
+	current->state = TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE;
+	schedule_timeout(HZ/100 + 1);
 
 	for (i = 0; i < N_FDC; i++) {
 		fdc = i;
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/