Don Zickus authored May 18, 2015 and Ingo Molnar committed May 27, 2015

I stumbled upon an AMD box that had the BIOS using a hardware performance
counter. Instead of printing out a warning and continuing, it failed and
blocked further perf counter usage.

Looking through the history, I found this commit:

  a5ebe0ba

 ("perf/x86: Check all MSRs before passing hw check")

which tweaked the rules for a Xen guest on an almost identical box and now
changed the behaviour.

Unfortunately the rules were tweaked incorrectly and will always lead to
MSR failures even though the MSRs are completely fine.

What happens now is in arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c::check_hw_exists():

<snip>
        for (i = 0; i < x86_pmu.num_counters; i++) {
                reg = x86_pmu_config_addr(i);
                ret = rdmsrl_safe(reg, &val);
                if (ret)
                        goto msr_fail;
                if (val & ARCH_PERFMON_EVENTSEL_ENABLE) {
                        bios_fail = 1;
                        val_fail = val;
                        reg_fail = reg;
                }
        }

<snip>
        /*
         * Read the current value, change it and read it back to see if it
         * matches, this is needed to detect certain hardware emulators
         * (qemu/kvm) that don't trap on the MSR access and always return 0s.
         */
        reg = x86_pmu_event_addr(0);
				^^^^

if the first perf counter is enabled, then this routine will always fail
because the counter is running. :-(

        if (rdmsrl_safe(reg, &val))
                goto msr_fail;
        val ^= 0xffffUL;
        ret = wrmsrl_safe(reg, val);
        ret |= rdmsrl_safe(reg, &val_new);
        if (ret || val != val_new)
                goto msr_fail;

The above bios_fail used to be a 'goto' which is why it worked in the past.

Further, most vendors have migrated to using fixed counters to hide their
evilness hence this problem rarely shows up now days except on a few old boxes.

I fixed my problem and kept the spirit of the original Xen fix, by recording a
safe non-enable register to be used safely for the reading/writing check.
Because it is not enabled, this passes on bare metal boxes (like metal), but
should continue to throw an msr_fail on Xen guests because the register isn't
emulated yet.

Now I get a proper bios_fail error message and Xen should still see their
msr_fail message (untested).

Signed-off-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com
Cc: konrad.wilk@oracle.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1431976608-56970-1-git-send-email-dzickus@redhat.com


Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>