<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<title>linux.git/arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso32, branch v4.19</title>
<subtitle>Linux kernel source tree</subtitle>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/'/>
<entry>
<title>powerpc: Add build salt to the vDSO</title>
<updated>2018-07-17T16:18:05+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Laura Abbott</name>
<email>labbott@redhat.com</email>
</author>
<published>2018-07-06T00:49:39+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=b399baaaf7522750eab0c2a6b9f0dc511d878dd6'/>
<id>b399baaaf7522750eab0c2a6b9f0dc511d878dd6</id>
<content type='text'>
The vDSO needs to have a unique build id in a similar manner
to the kernel and modules. Use the build salt macro.

Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott &lt;labbott@redhat.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada &lt;yamada.masahiro@socionext.com&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
The vDSO needs to have a unique build id in a similar manner
to the kernel and modules. Use the build salt macro.

Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott &lt;labbott@redhat.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada &lt;yamada.masahiro@socionext.com&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>powerpc/kbuild: Remove CROSS32 defines from top level powerpc Makefile</title>
<updated>2018-06-01T13:08:06+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Nicholas Piggin</name>
<email>npiggin@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2018-05-30T12:19:20+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=af3901cbbd3de182aafb8ee553c825c0074df6a2'/>
<id>af3901cbbd3de182aafb8ee553c825c0074df6a2</id>
<content type='text'>
Switch VDSO32 build over to use CROSS32_COMPILE directly, and have
it pass in -m32 after the standard c_flags. This allows endianness
overrides to be removed and the endian and bitness flags moved into
standard flags variables.

Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin &lt;npiggin@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Switch VDSO32 build over to use CROSS32_COMPILE directly, and have
it pass in -m32 after the standard c_flags. This allows endianness
overrides to be removed and the endian and bitness flags moved into
standard flags variables.

Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin &lt;npiggin@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license</title>
<updated>2017-11-02T10:10:55+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Greg Kroah-Hartman</name>
<email>gregkh@linuxfoundation.org</email>
</author>
<published>2017-11-01T14:07:57+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=b24413180f5600bcb3bb70fbed5cf186b60864bd'/>
<id>b24413180f5600bcb3bb70fbed5cf186b60864bd</id>
<content type='text'>
Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which
makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.

By default all files without license information are under the default
license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.

Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0'
SPDX license identifier.  The SPDX identifier is a legally binding
shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.

This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and
Philippe Ombredanne.

How this work was done:

Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of
the use cases:
 - file had no licensing information it it.
 - file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it,
 - file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information,

Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases
where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license
had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords.

The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to
a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the
output of two independent scanners (ScanCode &amp; Windriver) producing SPDX
tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne.  Philippe prepared the
base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files.

The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files
assessed.  Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner
results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s)
to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not
immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was:
 - Files considered eligible had to be source code files.
 - Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained &gt;5
   lines of source
 - File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if &lt;5
   lines).

All documentation files were explicitly excluded.

The following heuristics were used to determine which SPDX license
identifiers to apply.

 - when both scanners couldn't find any license traces, file was
   considered to have no license information in it, and the top level
   COPYING file license applied.

   For non */uapi/* files that summary was:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|-------
   GPL-2.0                                              11139

   and resulted in the first patch in this series.

   If that file was a */uapi/* path one, it was "GPL-2.0 WITH
   Linux-syscall-note" otherwise it was "GPL-2.0".  Results of that was:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|-------
   GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        930

   and resulted in the second patch in this series.

 - if a file had some form of licensing information in it, and was one
   of the */uapi/* ones, it was denoted with the Linux-syscall-note if
   any GPL family license was found in the file or had no licensing in
   it (per prior point).  Results summary:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|------
   GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note                       270
   GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      169
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause)    21
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    17
   LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      15
   GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       14
   ((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    5
   LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       4
   LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        3
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT)              3
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT)             1

   and that resulted in the third patch in this series.

 - when the two scanners agreed on the detected license(s), that became
   the concluded license(s).

 - when there was disagreement between the two scanners (one detected a
   license but the other didn't, or they both detected different
   licenses) a manual inspection of the file occurred.

 - In most cases a manual inspection of the information in the file
   resulted in a clear resolution of the license that should apply (and
   which scanner probably needed to revisit its heuristics).

 - When it was not immediately clear, the license identifier was
   confirmed with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

 - If there was any question as to the appropriate license identifier,
   the file was flagged for further research and to be revisited later
   in time.

In total, over 70 hours of logged manual review was done on the
spreadsheet to determine the SPDX license identifiers to apply to the
source files by Kate, Philippe, Thomas and, in some cases, confirmation
by lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

Kate also obtained a third independent scan of the 4.13 code base from
FOSSology, and compared selected files where the other two scanners
disagreed against that SPDX file, to see if there was new insights.  The
Windriver scanner is based on an older version of FOSSology in part, so
they are related.

Thomas did random spot checks in about 500 files from the spreadsheets
for the uapi headers and agreed with SPDX license identifier in the
files he inspected. For the non-uapi files Thomas did random spot checks
in about 15000 files.

In initial set of patches against 4.14-rc6, 3 files were found to have
copy/paste license identifier errors, and have been fixed to reflect the
correct identifier.

Additionally Philippe spent 10 hours this week doing a detailed manual
inspection and review of the 12,461 patched files from the initial patch
version early this week with:
 - a full scancode scan run, collecting the matched texts, detected
   license ids and scores
 - reviewing anything where there was a license detected (about 500+
   files) to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct
 - reviewing anything where there was no detection but the patch license
   was not GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note to ensure that the applied
   SPDX license was correct

This produced a worksheet with 20 files needing minor correction.  This
worksheet was then exported into 3 different .csv files for the
different types of files to be modified.

These .csv files were then reviewed by Greg.  Thomas wrote a script to
parse the csv files and add the proper SPDX tag to the file, in the
format that the file expected.  This script was further refined by Greg
based on the output to detect more types of files automatically and to
distinguish between header and source .c files (which need different
comment types.)  Finally Greg ran the script using the .csv files to
generate the patches.

Reviewed-by: Kate Stewart &lt;kstewart@linuxfoundation.org&gt;
Reviewed-by: Philippe Ombredanne &lt;pombredanne@nexb.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner &lt;tglx@linutronix.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman &lt;gregkh@linuxfoundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which
makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.

By default all files without license information are under the default
license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.

Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0'
SPDX license identifier.  The SPDX identifier is a legally binding
shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.

This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and
Philippe Ombredanne.

How this work was done:

Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of
the use cases:
 - file had no licensing information it it.
 - file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it,
 - file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information,

Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases
where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license
had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords.

The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to
a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the
output of two independent scanners (ScanCode &amp; Windriver) producing SPDX
tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne.  Philippe prepared the
base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files.

The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files
assessed.  Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner
results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s)
to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not
immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was:
 - Files considered eligible had to be source code files.
 - Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained &gt;5
   lines of source
 - File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if &lt;5
   lines).

All documentation files were explicitly excluded.

The following heuristics were used to determine which SPDX license
identifiers to apply.

 - when both scanners couldn't find any license traces, file was
   considered to have no license information in it, and the top level
   COPYING file license applied.

   For non */uapi/* files that summary was:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|-------
   GPL-2.0                                              11139

   and resulted in the first patch in this series.

   If that file was a */uapi/* path one, it was "GPL-2.0 WITH
   Linux-syscall-note" otherwise it was "GPL-2.0".  Results of that was:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|-------
   GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        930

   and resulted in the second patch in this series.

 - if a file had some form of licensing information in it, and was one
   of the */uapi/* ones, it was denoted with the Linux-syscall-note if
   any GPL family license was found in the file or had no licensing in
   it (per prior point).  Results summary:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|------
   GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note                       270
   GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      169
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause)    21
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    17
   LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      15
   GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       14
   ((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    5
   LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       4
   LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        3
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT)              3
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT)             1

   and that resulted in the third patch in this series.

 - when the two scanners agreed on the detected license(s), that became
   the concluded license(s).

 - when there was disagreement between the two scanners (one detected a
   license but the other didn't, or they both detected different
   licenses) a manual inspection of the file occurred.

 - In most cases a manual inspection of the information in the file
   resulted in a clear resolution of the license that should apply (and
   which scanner probably needed to revisit its heuristics).

 - When it was not immediately clear, the license identifier was
   confirmed with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

 - If there was any question as to the appropriate license identifier,
   the file was flagged for further research and to be revisited later
   in time.

In total, over 70 hours of logged manual review was done on the
spreadsheet to determine the SPDX license identifiers to apply to the
source files by Kate, Philippe, Thomas and, in some cases, confirmation
by lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

Kate also obtained a third independent scan of the 4.13 code base from
FOSSology, and compared selected files where the other two scanners
disagreed against that SPDX file, to see if there was new insights.  The
Windriver scanner is based on an older version of FOSSology in part, so
they are related.

Thomas did random spot checks in about 500 files from the spreadsheets
for the uapi headers and agreed with SPDX license identifier in the
files he inspected. For the non-uapi files Thomas did random spot checks
in about 15000 files.

In initial set of patches against 4.14-rc6, 3 files were found to have
copy/paste license identifier errors, and have been fixed to reflect the
correct identifier.

Additionally Philippe spent 10 hours this week doing a detailed manual
inspection and review of the 12,461 patched files from the initial patch
version early this week with:
 - a full scancode scan run, collecting the matched texts, detected
   license ids and scores
 - reviewing anything where there was a license detected (about 500+
   files) to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct
 - reviewing anything where there was no detection but the patch license
   was not GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note to ensure that the applied
   SPDX license was correct

This produced a worksheet with 20 files needing minor correction.  This
worksheet was then exported into 3 different .csv files for the
different types of files to be modified.

These .csv files were then reviewed by Greg.  Thomas wrote a script to
parse the csv files and add the proper SPDX tag to the file, in the
format that the file expected.  This script was further refined by Greg
based on the output to detect more types of files automatically and to
distinguish between header and source .c files (which need different
comment types.)  Finally Greg ran the script using the .csv files to
generate the patches.

Reviewed-by: Kate Stewart &lt;kstewart@linuxfoundation.org&gt;
Reviewed-by: Philippe Ombredanne &lt;pombredanne@nexb.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner &lt;tglx@linutronix.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman &lt;gregkh@linuxfoundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>powerpc/time: refactor MFTB() to limit number of ifdefs</title>
<updated>2017-08-10T13:32:09+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Christophe Leroy</name>
<email>christophe.leroy@c-s.fr</email>
</author>
<published>2017-08-08T11:58:50+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=72e4b2cdf07b4c43115f058ed74d694eab5d6454'/>
<id>72e4b2cdf07b4c43115f058ed74d694eab5d6454</id>
<content type='text'>
The 8xx cannot access the TBL and TBU registers using mfspr/mtspr
It must be accessed using mftb/mftbu

Due to this, there is a number of places with #ifdef CONFIG_8xx

This patch defines new macros MFTBL(x) and MFTBU(x) on the same model
as MFTB(x) and tries to make use of them as much as possible.

In arch/powerpc/include/asm/timex.h, we also remove the ifdef
for the asm() operands as the compiler doesn't mind unused operands

Signed-off-by: Christophe Leroy &lt;christophe.leroy@c-s.fr&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
The 8xx cannot access the TBL and TBU registers using mfspr/mtspr
It must be accessed using mftb/mftbu

Due to this, there is a number of places with #ifdef CONFIG_8xx

This patch defines new macros MFTBL(x) and MFTBU(x) on the same model
as MFTB(x) and tries to make use of them as much as possible.

In arch/powerpc/include/asm/timex.h, we also remove the ifdef
for the asm() operands as the compiler doesn't mind unused operands

Signed-off-by: Christophe Leroy &lt;christophe.leroy@c-s.fr&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>powerpc/vdso: Fix build rules to rebuild vdsos correctly</title>
<updated>2016-08-10T13:04:12+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Nicholas Piggin</name>
<email>npiggin@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-08-09T12:17:29+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=b9a4a0d02c5b8d9a1397c11d741d2a1a56381178'/>
<id>b9a4a0d02c5b8d9a1397c11d741d2a1a56381178</id>
<content type='text'>
When using if_changed, we need to add FORCE as a dependency (see
Documentation/kbuild/makefiles.txt) otherwise we don't get command line
change checking amongst other things. This has resulted in vdsos not
being rebuilt when switching between big and little endian.

The vdso64/32ld commands have to be changed around to avoid pulling
FORCE into the linker command line (code copied from x86).

Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin &lt;npiggin@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
When using if_changed, we need to add FORCE as a dependency (see
Documentation/kbuild/makefiles.txt) otherwise we don't get command line
change checking amongst other things. This has resulted in vdsos not
being rebuilt when switching between big and little endian.

The vdso64/32ld commands have to be changed around to avoid pulling
FORCE into the linker command line (code copied from x86).

Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin &lt;npiggin@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>powerpc: enable UBSAN support</title>
<updated>2016-01-21T01:09:18+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Daniel Axtens</name>
<email>dja@axtens.net</email>
</author>
<published>2016-01-20T23:00:58+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=bf76f73c5f6554df1bd337aea5b3ea561f09632c'/>
<id>bf76f73c5f6554df1bd337aea5b3ea561f09632c</id>
<content type='text'>
This hooks up UBSAN support for PowerPC.

So far it's found some interesting cases where we don't properly sanitise
input to shifts, including one in our futex handling.  Nothing critical,
but interesting and worth fixing.

[valentinrothberg@gmail.com: arch/powerpc/Kconfig: fix typo in select statement]
Signed-off-by: Daniel Axtens &lt;dja@axtens.net&gt;
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin &lt;aryabinin@virtuozzo.com&gt;
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt &lt;benh@kernel.crashing.org&gt;
Tested-by: Andrew Donnellan &lt;andrew.donnellan@au1.ibm.com&gt;
Acked-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
Signed-off-by: Valentin Rothberg &lt;valentinrothberg@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
This hooks up UBSAN support for PowerPC.

So far it's found some interesting cases where we don't properly sanitise
input to shifts, including one in our futex handling.  Nothing critical,
but interesting and worth fixing.

[valentinrothberg@gmail.com: arch/powerpc/Kconfig: fix typo in select statement]
Signed-off-by: Daniel Axtens &lt;dja@axtens.net&gt;
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin &lt;aryabinin@virtuozzo.com&gt;
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt &lt;benh@kernel.crashing.org&gt;
Tested-by: Andrew Donnellan &lt;andrew.donnellan@au1.ibm.com&gt;
Acked-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
Signed-off-by: Valentin Rothberg &lt;valentinrothberg@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>powerpc: Standardise on NR_syscalls rather than __NR_syscalls.</title>
<updated>2015-11-26T11:11:17+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Rashmica Gupta</name>
<email>rashmicy@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2015-11-19T06:04:53+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=f43194e45852b0455d2a3e3730f70daa76958423'/>
<id>f43194e45852b0455d2a3e3730f70daa76958423</id>
<content type='text'>
Most architectures use NR_syscalls as the #define for the number of syscalls.

We use __NR_syscalls, and then define NR_syscalls as __NR_syscalls.

__NR_syscalls is not used outside arch code, whereas NR_syscalls is. So as
NR_syscalls must be defined and __NR_syscalls does not, replace __NR_syscalls
with NR_syscalls.

Signed-off-by: Rashmica Gupta &lt;rashmicy@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Most architectures use NR_syscalls as the #define for the number of syscalls.

We use __NR_syscalls, and then define NR_syscalls as __NR_syscalls.

__NR_syscalls is not used outside arch code, whereas NR_syscalls is. So as
NR_syscalls must be defined and __NR_syscalls does not, replace __NR_syscalls
with NR_syscalls.

Signed-off-by: Rashmica Gupta &lt;rashmicy@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>powerpc/vdso: Avoid link stack corruption in __get_datapage()</title>
<updated>2015-10-01T06:52:02+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Michael Neuling</name>
<email>mikey@neuling.org</email>
</author>
<published>2015-09-25T04:01:40+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=c974809a26a13e40254dbe3cf46f49aa32acca11'/>
<id>c974809a26a13e40254dbe3cf46f49aa32acca11</id>
<content type='text'>
powerpc has a link register (lr) used for calling functions. We "bl
&lt;func&gt;" to call a function, and "blr" to return back to the call site.

The lr is only a single register, so if we call another function from
inside this function (ie. nested calls), software must save away the
lr on the software stack before calling the new function. Before
returning (ie. before the "blr"), the lr is restored by software from
the software stack.

This makes branch prediction quite difficult for the processor as it
will only know the branch target just before the "blr".

To help with this, modern powerpc processors keep a (non-architected)
hardware stack of lr called a "link stack". When a "bl &lt;func&gt;" is
run, the lr is pushed onto this stack. When a "blr" is called, the
branch predictor pops the lr value from the top of the link stack, and
uses it to predict the branch target. Hence the processor pipeline
knows a lot earlier the branch target.

This works great but there are some cases where you call "bl" but
without a matching "blr". Once such case is when trying to determine
the program counter (which can't be read directly). Here you "bl+4;
mflr" to get the program counter. If you do this, the link stack will
get out of sync with reality, causing the branch predictor to
mis-predict subsequent function returns.

To avoid this, modern micro-architectures have a special case of bl.
Using the form "bcl 20,31,+4", ensures the processor doesn't push to
the link stack.

The 32 and 64 bit variants of __get_datapage() use a "bl; mflr" to
determine the loaded address of the VDSO. The current versions of
these attempt to use this special bl variant.

Unfortunately they use +8 rather than the required +4. Hence the
current code results in the link stack getting out of sync with
reality and hence the resulting performance degradation.

This patch moves it to bcl+4 by moving __kernel_datapage_offset out of
__get_datapage().

With this patch, running a gettimeofday() (which uses
__get_datapage()) microbenchmark we get a decent bump in performance
on POWER7/8.

For the benchmark in tools/testing/selftests/powerpc/benchmarks/gettimeofday.c
  POWER8:
    64bit gets ~4% improvement
    32bit gets ~9% improvement
  POWER7:
    64bit gets ~7% improvement

Signed-off-by: Michael Neuling &lt;mikey@neuling.org&gt;
Reported-by: Aaron Sawdey &lt;sawdey@us.ibm.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
powerpc has a link register (lr) used for calling functions. We "bl
&lt;func&gt;" to call a function, and "blr" to return back to the call site.

The lr is only a single register, so if we call another function from
inside this function (ie. nested calls), software must save away the
lr on the software stack before calling the new function. Before
returning (ie. before the "blr"), the lr is restored by software from
the software stack.

This makes branch prediction quite difficult for the processor as it
will only know the branch target just before the "blr".

To help with this, modern powerpc processors keep a (non-architected)
hardware stack of lr called a "link stack". When a "bl &lt;func&gt;" is
run, the lr is pushed onto this stack. When a "blr" is called, the
branch predictor pops the lr value from the top of the link stack, and
uses it to predict the branch target. Hence the processor pipeline
knows a lot earlier the branch target.

This works great but there are some cases where you call "bl" but
without a matching "blr". Once such case is when trying to determine
the program counter (which can't be read directly). Here you "bl+4;
mflr" to get the program counter. If you do this, the link stack will
get out of sync with reality, causing the branch predictor to
mis-predict subsequent function returns.

To avoid this, modern micro-architectures have a special case of bl.
Using the form "bcl 20,31,+4", ensures the processor doesn't push to
the link stack.

The 32 and 64 bit variants of __get_datapage() use a "bl; mflr" to
determine the loaded address of the VDSO. The current versions of
these attempt to use this special bl variant.

Unfortunately they use +8 rather than the required +4. Hence the
current code results in the link stack getting out of sync with
reality and hence the resulting performance degradation.

This patch moves it to bcl+4 by moving __kernel_datapage_offset out of
__get_datapage().

With this patch, running a gettimeofday() (which uses
__get_datapage()) microbenchmark we get a decent bump in performance
on POWER7/8.

For the benchmark in tools/testing/selftests/powerpc/benchmarks/gettimeofday.c
  POWER8:
    64bit gets ~4% improvement
    32bit gets ~9% improvement
  POWER7:
    64bit gets ~7% improvement

Signed-off-by: Michael Neuling &lt;mikey@neuling.org&gt;
Reported-by: Aaron Sawdey &lt;sawdey@us.ibm.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>powerpc/vdso: Emit GNU &amp; SysV hashes</title>
<updated>2015-10-01T06:52:00+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Michael Ellerman</name>
<email>mpe@ellerman.id.au</email>
</author>
<published>2015-08-07T03:05:42+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=787b393c9f6300c343600d39f53f1b9f09d3684f'/>
<id>787b393c9f6300c343600d39f53f1b9f09d3684f</id>
<content type='text'>
Andy Lutomirski says:

  Some dynamic loaders may be slightly faster if a GNU hash is
  available.

  This is unlikely to have any measurable effect on the time it takes
  to resolve vdso symbols (since there are so few of them).  In some
  contexts, it can be a win for a different reason: if every DSO has a
  GNU hash section, then libc can avoid calculating SysV hashes at
  all. Both musl and glibc appear to have this optimization.

Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Andy Lutomirski says:

  Some dynamic loaders may be slightly faster if a GNU hash is
  available.

  This is unlikely to have any measurable effect on the time it takes
  to resolve vdso symbols (since there are so few of them).  In some
  contexts, it can be a win for a different reason: if every DSO has a
  GNU hash section, then libc can avoid calculating SysV hashes at
  all. Both musl and glibc appear to have this optimization.

Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>powerpc: 32 bit getcpu VDSO function uses 64 bit instructions</title>
<updated>2014-11-26T22:42:12+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Anton Blanchard</name>
<email>anton@samba.org</email>
</author>
<published>2014-11-26T21:11:28+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=152d44a853e42952f6c8a504fb1f8eefd21fd5fd'/>
<id>152d44a853e42952f6c8a504fb1f8eefd21fd5fd</id>
<content type='text'>
I used some 64 bit instructions when adding the 32 bit getcpu VDSO
function. Fix it.

Fixes: 18ad51dd342a ("powerpc: Add VDSO version of getcpu")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard &lt;anton@samba.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
I used some 64 bit instructions when adding the 32 bit getcpu VDSO
function. Fix it.

Fixes: 18ad51dd342a ("powerpc: Add VDSO version of getcpu")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard &lt;anton@samba.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman &lt;mpe@ellerman.id.au&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
</feed>
