• Rene Herman's avatar
    x86: provide a DMI based port 0x80 I/O delay override. · b02aae9c
    Rene Herman authored
    x86: provide a DMI based port 0x80 I/O delay override.
    
    Certain (HP) laptops experience trouble from our port 0x80 I/O delay
    writes. This patch provides for a DMI based switch to the "alternate
    diagnostic port" 0xed (as used by some BIOSes as well) for these.
    
    David P. Reed confirmed that port 0xed works for him and provides a
    proper delay. The symptoms of _not_ working are a hanging machine,
    with "hwclock" use being a direct trigger.
    
    Earlier versions of this attempted to simply use udelay(2), with the
    2 being a value tested to be a nicely conservative upper-bound with
    help from many on the linux-kernel mailinglist but that approach has
    two problems.
    
    First, pre-loops_per_jiffy calibration (which is post PIT init while
    some implementations of the PIT are actually one of the historically
    problematic devices that need the delay) udelay() isn't particularly
    well-defined. We could initialise loops_per_jiffy conservatively (and
    based on CPU family so as to not unduly delay old machines) which
    would sort of work, but...
    
    Second, delaying isn't the only effect that a write to port 0x80 has.
    It's also a PCI posting barrier which some devices may be explicitly
    or implicitly relying on. Alan Cox did a survey and found evidence
    that additionally some drivers may be racy on SMP without the bus
    locking outb.
    
    Switching to an inb() makes the timing too unpredictable and as such,
    this DMI based switch should be the safest approach for now. Any more
    invasive changes should get more rigid testing first. It's moreover
    only very few machines with the problem and a DMI based hack seems
    to fit that situation.
    
    This also introduces a command-line parameter "io_delay" to override
    the DMI based choice again:
    
    	io_delay=<standard|alternate>
    
    where "standard" means using the standard port 0x80 and "alternate"
    port 0xed.
    
    This retains the udelay method as a config (CONFIG_UDELAY_IO_DELAY) and
    command-line ("io_delay=udelay") choice for testing purposes as well.
    
    This does not change the io_delay() in the boot code which is using
    the same port 0x80 I/O delay but those do not appear to be a problem
    as David P. Reed reported the problem was already gone after using the
    udelay version. He moreover reported that booting with "acpi=off" also
    fixed things and seeing as how ACPI isn't touched until after this DMI
    based I/O port switch I believe it's safe to leave the ones in the boot
    code be.
    
    The DMI strings from David's HP Pavilion dv9000z are in there already
    and we need to get/verify the DMI info from other machines with the
    problem, notably the HP Pavilion dv6000z.
    
    This patch is partly based on earlier patches from Pavel Machek and
    David P. Reed.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRene Herman <rene.herman@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    b02aae9c
io_delay.c 2.12 KB