x86, 32-bit: fix boot failure on TSC-less processors
Booting 2.6.26-rc6 on my 486 DX/4 fails with a "BUG: Int 6" (invalid opcode) and a kernel halt immediately after the kernel has been uncompressed. The BUG shows EIP pointing to an rdtsc instruction in native_read_tsc(), invoked from native_sched_clock(). (This error occurs so early that not even the serial console can capture it.) A bisection showed that this bug first occurs in 2.6.26-rc3-git7, via commit 9ccc906c: >x86: distangle user disabled TSC from unstable > >tsc_enabled is set to 0 from the command line switch "notsc" and from >the mark_tsc_unstable code. Seperate those functionalities and replace >tsc_enable with tsc_disable. This makes also the native_sched_clock() >decision when to use TSC understandable. > >Preparatory patch to solve the sched_clock() issue on 32 bit. > >Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> The core reason for this bug is that native_sched_clock() gets called before tsc_init(). Before the commit above, tsc_32.c used a "tsc_enabled" variable which defaulted to 0 == disabled, and which only got enabled late in tsc_init(). Thus early calls to native_sched_clock() would skip the TSC and use jiffies instead. After the commit above, tsc_32.c uses a "tsc_disabled" variable which defaults to 0, meaning that the TSC is Ok to use. Early calls to native_sched_clock() now erroneously try to use the TSC on !cpu_has_tsc processors, leading to invalid opcode exceptions. My proposed fix is to initialise tsc_disabled to a "soft disabled" state distinct from the hard disabled state set up by the "notsc" kernel option. This fixes the native_sched_clock() problem. It also allows tsc_init() to be simplified: instead of setting tsc_disabled = 1 on every error return, we just set tsc_disabled = 0 once when all checks have succeeded. I've verified that this lets my 486 boot again. I've also verified that a Core2 machine still uses the TSC as clocksource after the patch. Signed-off-by: Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@it.uu.se> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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