skiboot-5.9.5

skiboot 5.9.5 was released on Wednesday December 13th, 2017. It replaces skiboot-5.9.4 as the current stable release in the 5.9.x series.

Over skiboot-5.9.4, we have a few bug fixes, they are:

  • Fix extremely rare race in timer code.

  • xive: Ensure VC informational FIRs are masked

    Some HostBoot versions leave those as checkstop, they are harmless and can sometimes occur during normal operations.

  • xive: Fix occasional VC checkstops in xive_reset

    The current workaround for the scrub bug described in __xive_cache_scrub() has an issue in that it can leave dirty invalid entries in the cache.

    When cleaning up EQs or VPs during reset, if we then remove the underlying indirect page for these entries, the XIVE will checkstop when trying to flush them out of the cache.

    This replaces the existing workaround with a new pair of workarounds for VPs and EQs:

    • The VP one does the dummy watch on another entry than the one we scrubbed (which does the job of pushing old stores out) using an entry that is known to be backed by a permanent indirect page.

    • The EQ one switches to a more efficient workaround which consists of doing a non-side-effect ESB load from the EQ’s ESe control bits.

  • io: Add load_wait() helper

    This uses the standard form twi/isync pair to ensure a load is consumed by the core before continuing. This can be necessary under some circumstances for example when having the following sequence:

    • Store reg A

    • Load reg A (ensure above store pushed out)

    • delay loop

    • Store reg A

    IE, a mandatory delay between 2 stores. In theory the first store is only guaranteed to rach the device after the load from the same location has completed. However the processor will start executing the delay loop without waiting for the return value from the load.

    This construct enforces that the delay loop isn’t executed until the load value has been returned.

  • xive: Do not return a trigger page for an escalation interrupt

    This is bogus, we don’t support them. (Thankfully the callers didn’t actually try to use this on escalation interrupts).

  • xive: Mark a freed IRQ’s IVE as valid and masked

    Removing the valid bit means a FIR will trip if it’s accessed inadvertently. Under some circumstances, the XIVE will speculatively access an IVE for a masked interrupt and trip it. So make sure that freed entries are still marked valid (but masked).

  • hw/nx: Fix NX BAR assignments

    The NX rng BAR is used by each core to source random numbers for the DARN instruction. Currently we configure each core to use the NX rng of the chip that it exists on. Unfortunately, the NX can be deconfigured by hostboot and in this case we need to use the NX of a different chip.

    This patch moves the BAR assignments for the NX into the normal nx-rng init path. This lets us check if the normal (chip local) NX is active when configuring which NX a core should use so that we can fallback gracefully.