From 45daae575e08bbf7405c5a3633e956fa364d1b4f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Ingo Molnar Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 10:24:23 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] perf, x86: Complain louder about BIOSen corrupting CPU/PMU state and continue Eric Dumazet reported that hardware PMU events do not work on his system, due to the BIOS corrupting PMU state: Performance Events: PEBS fmt0+, Core2 events, Broken BIOS detected, using software events only. [Firmware Bug]: the BIOS has corrupted hw-PMU resources (MSR 186 is 43003c) Linus suggested that we continue in the face of such BIOS-induced CPU state corruption: http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/3/24/608 Such BIOSes will have to be fixed - Linux developers rely on a working and fully capable PMU and the BIOS interfering with the CPU's PMU state is simply not acceptable. So this patch changes perf to continue when it detects such BIOS interaction, some hardware events may be unreliable due to the BIOS writing and re-writing them - there's not much the kernel can do about that but to detect the corruption and report it. Reported-and-tested-by: Eric Dumazet Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Thomas Gleixner Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo Cc: Frederic Weisbecker Cc: Mike Galbraith Cc: Steven Rostedt LKML-Reference: Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar --- arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c | 9 +++++++-- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c index ec46eea0c4ed..eb00677ee2ae 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c @@ -500,12 +500,17 @@ static bool check_hw_exists(void) return true; bios_fail: - printk(KERN_CONT "Broken BIOS detected, using software events only.\n"); + /* + * We still allow the PMU driver to operate: + */ + printk(KERN_CONT "Broken BIOS detected, complain to your hardware vendor.\n"); printk(KERN_ERR FW_BUG "the BIOS has corrupted hw-PMU resources (MSR %x is %Lx)\n", reg, val); - return false; + + return true; msr_fail: printk(KERN_CONT "Broken PMU hardware detected, using software events only.\n"); + return false; } -- 2.39.2