Roland reported that his DELL T5810 sports a value add BIOS which
completely wreckages the TSC. The squirmware [(TM) Ingo Molnar] boots with
random negative TSC_ADJUST values, different on all CPUs. That renders the
TSC useless because the sycnchronization check fails.
Roland tested the new TSC_ADJUST mechanism. While it manages to readjust
the TSCs he needs to disable the TSC deadline timer, otherwise the machine
just stops booting.
Deeper investigation unearthed that the TSC deadline timer is sensitive to
the TSC_ADJUST value. Writing TSC_ADJUST to a negative value results in an
interrupt storm caused by the TSC deadline timer.
This does not make any sense and it's hard to imagine what kind of hardware
wreckage is behind that misfeature, but it's reliably reproducible on other
systems which have TSC_ADJUST and TSC deadline timer.
While it would be understandable that a big enough negative value which
moves the resulting TSC readout into the negative space could have the
described effect, this happens even with a adjust value of -1, which keeps
the TSC readout definitely in the positive space. The compare register for
the TSC deadline timer is set to a positive value larger than the TSC, but
despite not having reached the deadline the interrupt is raised
immediately. If this happens on the boot CPU, then the machine dies
silently because this setup happens before the NMI watchdog is armed.
Further experiments showed that any other adjustment of TSC_ADJUST works as
expected as long as it stays in the positive range. The direction of the
adjustment has no influence either. See the lkml link for further analysis.
Yet another proof for the theory that timers are designed by janitors and
the underlying (obviously undocumented) mechanisms which allow BIOSes to
wreckage them are considered a feature. Well done Intel - NOT!
To address this wreckage add the following sanity measures:
- If the TSC_ADJUST value on the boot cpu is not 0, set it to 0
- If the TSC_ADJUST value on any cpu is negative, set it to 0
- Prevent the cross package synchronization mechanism from setting negative
TSC_ADJUST values.
Reported-and-tested-by: Roland Scheidegger <rscheidegger_lists@hispeed.ch>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Bruce Schlobohm <bruce.schlobohm@intel.com>
Cc: Kevin Stanton <kevin.b.stanton@intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Allen Hung <allen_hung@dell.com>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20161213131211.397588033@linutronix.de
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
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