Re: [Fdutils] DMA cache consistency bug introduced in 2.6.28 (Was:Re: Cannot format floppies under kernel 2.6.*?)

[Pallipadi, Venkatesh]

On Tue, 2009-12-22 at 09:57 -0800, Mark Hounschell wrote:
> On 12/22/2009 12:38 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > 
> > [ Ingo, Venki and Shaohua added to cc: see the whole thread on lkml for 
> >   details, but Mark is basically chasing down a situation where the floppy 
> >   driver seems to have trouble formatting floppies, and it happened 
> >   between 2.6.27 and .28. The trouble seems to be that a DMA transfer of a 
> >   memory block transfers the wrong value for the first byte of the block.
> > 
> >   Which should be impossible, but whatever. Some part of the system has a 
> >   cached buffer that isn't flushed.
> > 
> >   What gets _you_ guys involved is that Mark cannot reproduce the bug if 
> >   HPET is disabled in the BIOS or by using 'nohpet'. He found that out by 
> >   pure luck while bisecting, because some time during his bisect, his 
> >   machine wouldn't even boot with HPET.
> > 
> >   So the problem is: with HPET enabled, 2.6.27.4 _used_ to work. But 
> >   2.6.28 (and current -git) does not.  Any ideas? ]
> > 
> > On Tue, 22 Dec 2009, Mark Hounschell wrote:
> >>
> >> Ok, I may have something that might help.
> >>
> >> # git bisect bad
> >> 26afe5f2fbf06ea0765aaa316640c4dd472310c0 is the first bad commit
> >> commit 26afe5f2fbf06ea0765aaa316640c4dd472310c0
> >> Author: venkatesh.pallipadi@xxxxxxxxx <venkatesh.pallipadi@xxxxxxxxx>
> >> Date:   Fri Sep 5 18:02:18 2008 -0700
> >>
> >>     x86: HPET_MSI Initialise per-cpu HPET timers
> >>
> >>     Initialize a per CPU HPET MSI timer when possible. We retain the HPET
> >>     timer 0 (IRQ 0) and timer 1 (IRQ 8) as is when legacy mode is being used. We
> >>     setup the remaining HPET timers as per CPU MSI based timers. This per CPU
> >>     timer will eliminate the need for timer broadcasting with IRQ 0 when there
> >>     is non-functional LAPIC timer across CPU deep C-states.
> >>
> >>     If there are more CPUs than number of available timers, CPUs that do not
> >>     find any timer to use will continue using LAPIC and IRQ 0 broadcast.
> >>
> >>     Signed-off-by: Venkatesh Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@xxxxxxxxx>
> >>     Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@xxxxxxxxx>
> >>     Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx>
> >>
> >> And of coarse this was the first commit that I could not boot if I had hpet
> >> enabled. To get this one to boot (single user mode only) I had to add the
> >> the quiet cmdline option and following patch from to arch/x86/kernel/hpet.c
> >>
> >> commit  5ceb1a04187553e08c6ab60d30cee7c454ee139a
> >>
> >> @ -445,7 +445,7 @@ static int hpet_setup_irq(struct hpet_dev *dev)
> >>  {
> >>
> >>         if (request_irq(dev->irq, hpet_interrupt_handler,
> >> -                       IRQF_SHARED|IRQF_NOBALANCING, dev->name, dev))
> >> +                       IRQF_DISABLED|IRQF_NOBALANCING, dev->name, dev))
> >>                 return -1;
> >>
> >>         disable_irq(dev->irq);
> >>
> >> AND add the quiet cmdline option.
> > 
> > Ok, so we know why HPET didn't boot for you, and that was fixed later (by 
> > that 5ceb1a04). But is this also when the floppy started mis-behaving?
> > 
> 
> Commit 26afe5f2fbf06ea0765aaa316640c4dd472310c0 is when the floppy stops
> working
> and also when I could no longer boot with hpet enabled.


I am missing something here. Commit 26afe5f2 is where system does not
boot with HPET or is it where the floppy stops working when you boot
with HPET enabled.

Can you try "idle=halt" with both .27 and .28 with /proc/interrupts
output in each case. With that option, we should be using local APIC
timer and PIT, HPET or HPET with MSI should not really matter. Does it
still fail with .28 with that option?

Thanks,
Venki

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