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Commit 23316316 authored by Paul Mackerras's avatar Paul Mackerras Committed by Michael Ellerman
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powerpc: Revert "Use the POWER8 Micro Partition Prefetch Engine in KVM HV on POWER8"



This reverts commit 9678cdaa ("Use the POWER8 Micro Partition
Prefetch Engine in KVM HV on POWER8") because the original commit had
multiple, partly self-cancelling bugs, that could cause occasional
memory corruption.

In fact the logmpp instruction was incorrectly using register r0 as the
source of the buffer address and operation code, and depending on what
was in r0, it would either do nothing or corrupt the 64k page pointed to
by r0.

The logmpp instruction encoding and the operation code definitions could
be corrected, but then there is the problem that there is no clearly
defined way to know when the hardware has finished writing to the
buffer.

The original commit attempted to work around this by aborting the
write-out before starting the prefetch, but this is ineffective in the
case where the virtual core is now executing on a different physical
core from the one where the write-out was initiated.

These problems plus advice from the hardware designers not to use the
function (since the measured performance improvement from using the
feature was actually mostly negative), mean that reverting the code is
the best option.

Fixes: 9678cdaa ("Use the POWER8 Micro Partition Prefetch Engine in KVM HV on POWER8")
Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMichael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
parent abb39bc7
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