On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 04:58:12PM +0000, Ghannam, Yazen wrote:
> Yes, unused banks in the middle are counted in the MCG_CAP[Count] value.
Good.
> Okay, so you're saying the sysfs access should fail if a bank is
> disabled. Is that correct?
Well, think about it. If a bank is not operational for whatever reason,
we should tell the user that.
> Does "disabled" mean one or both of these?
> Unused = RAZ/WI in hardware
> Uninitialized = Not initialized by kernel due to quirks, etc.
>
> For an unused bank, it doesn't hurt to write MCA_CTL, but really
> there's no reason to do so and go through mce_restart().
Yes, but that bank is non-operational in some form. So we should prevent
all writes to it because, well, it is not going to do anything. And this
would be a good way to give feedback to the user that that is the case.
> For an uninitialized bank, should we prevent users from overriding the
> kernel's settings?
That all depends on the quirks. Whether we should allow them to be
overridden or not. I don't think we've ever thought about it, though.
Let's look at one:
if (c->x86_vendor == X86_VENDOR_AMD) {
if (c->x86 == 15 && cfg->banks > 4) {
/*
* disable GART TBL walk error reporting, which
* trips off incorrectly with the IOMMU & 3ware
* & Cerberus:
*/
clear_bit(10, (unsigned long *)&mce_banks[4].ctl);
Yah, so if the user reenables those GART errors, then she/he will see a
lot of MCEs reported and will maybe complain about it. And then we'll
say, but why did you enable them then. And she/he'll say: uh, didn't
know. Or, I was just poking at sysfs and this happened.
Then we can say, well, don't do that then! :-)
So my current position is, meh, who cares. But then I'm looking at
another quirk:
if (c->x86_vendor == X86_VENDOR_INTEL) {
/*
* SDM documents that on family 6 bank 0 should not be written
* because it aliases to another special BIOS controlled
* register.
* But it's not aliased anymore on model 0x1a+
* Don't ignore bank 0 completely because there could be a
* valid event later, merely don't write CTL0.
*/
if (c->x86 == 6 && c->x86_model < 0x1A && cfg->banks > 0)
mce_banks[0].init = 0;
which basically prevents that bank from being reinitialized. So I guess
we have that functionality already - we simply need to pay attention to
w->init.
Right?
--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.
Good mailing practices for 400: avoid top-posting and trim the reply.
