x86/vdso: Remove direct HPET access through the vDSO
authorAndy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Fri, 8 Apr 2016 00:16:59 +0000 (17:16 -0700)
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Wed, 13 Apr 2016 08:28:34 +0000 (10:28 +0200)
commit1ed95e52d902035e39a715ff3a314a893a96e5b7
tree6e06e68794f1cd7db67e3fa1a568e15d92ce71ae
parent42c748bb2544f21c3d115240527fe4478e193641
x86/vdso: Remove direct HPET access through the vDSO

Allowing user code to map the HPET is problematic.  HPET
implementations are notoriously buggy, and there are probably many
machines on which even MMIO reads from bogus HPET addresses are
problematic.

We have a report that the Dell Precision M2800 with:

  ACPI: HPET 0x00000000C8FE6238 000038 (v01 DELL   CBX3  01072009 AMI. 00000005)

is either so slow when accessing the HPET or actually hangs in some
regard, causing soft lockups to be reported if users do unexpected
things to the HPET.

The vclock HPET code has also always been a questionable speedup.
Accessing an HPET is exceedingly slow (on the order of several
microseconds), so the added overhead in requiring a syscall to read
the HPET is a small fraction of the total code of accessing it.

To avoid future problems, let's just delete the code entirely.

In the long run, this could actually be a speedup.  Waiman Long as a
patch to optimize the case where multiple CPUs contend for the HPET,
but that won't help unless all the accesses are mediated by the
kernel.

Reported-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@hpe.com>
Cc: Waiman Long <waiman.long@hpe.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/d2f90bba98db9905041cff294646d290d378f67a.1460074438.git.luto@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.c
arch/x86/entry/vdso/vdso-layout.lds.S
arch/x86/entry/vdso/vma.c
arch/x86/include/asm/clocksource.h
arch/x86/kernel/hpet.c
arch/x86/kvm/trace.h