Message-ID: <5085A9A8.5020004@zytor.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:16:40 -0700
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
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To: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
CC: HATAYAMA Daisuke <d.hatayama@jp.fujitsu.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        kexec@lists.infradead.org, x86@kernel.org, mingo@elte.hu,
        tglx@linutronix.de, len.brown@intel.com, fenghua.yu@intel.com,
        vgoyal@redhat.com, grant.likely@secretlab.ca, rob.herring@calxeda.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] x86, apic: Disable BSP if boot cpu is AP
References: <20121016043357.20003.5885.stgit@localhost6.localdomain6> <20121016043528.20003.601.stgit@localhost6.localdomain6> <873916i88t.fsf@xmission.com>
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On 10/22/2012 01:04 PM, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> HATAYAMA Daisuke <d.hatayama@jp.fujitsu.com> writes:
> 
>> We disable BSP if boot cpu is AP.
>>
>> INIT-INIT-SIPI sequence, a protocal to initiate AP, cannot be used for
>> BSP since it causes BSP jump to BIOS init code; typical visible
>> behaviour is hang or immediate reset, depending on the BIOS init code.
>>
>> INIT can be used to reset AP in a fatal system error state as
>> described in MP spec 3.7.3 Processor-specific INIT. In contrast, there
>> is no processor-specific INIT for BSP to initilize from a fatal system
>> error. It might be possible to do so by NMI plus any hand-crafted
>> reset code that is carefully designed, but at least I have no idea in
>> this direction now.
> 
> Has anyone looked at clearing bit 8 of the IA32_APIC_BASE_MSR (0x1B) on
> the bootstrap processor?  Bit 8 being the bit that indicates we are a
> bootstrap processor.
> 
> If we can clear that bit INIT will always place the processor in
> wait-for-startup-ipi mode and we won't have this problem.
> 
> That would also solve the hotunplug the bootstrap processor without
> using an NMI as well.
> 

IIRC Fenghua experimented with that and it didn't work.  Not all BIOSes
use that bit to determine BSP-ness.

	-hpa

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