x86/i8259: Skip probing when ACPI/MADT advertises PCAT compatibility
commit 128b0c9781c9f2651bea163cb85e52a6c7be0f9e upstream.
David and a few others reported that on certain newer systems some legacy
interrupts fail to work correctly.
Debugging revealed that the BIOS of these systems leaves the legacy PIC in
uninitialized state which makes the PIC detection fail and the kernel
switches to a dummy implementation.
Unfortunately this fallback causes quite some code to fail as it depends on
checks for the number of legacy PIC interrupts or the availability of the
real PIC.
In theory there is no reason to use the PIC on any modern system when
IO/APIC is available, but the dependencies on the related checks cannot be
resolved trivially and on short notice. This needs lots of analysis and
rework.
The PIC detection has been added to avoid quirky checks and force selection
of the dummy implementation all over the place, especially in VM guest
scenarios. So it's not an option to revert the relevant commit as that
would break a lot of other scenarios.
One solution would be to try to initialize the PIC on detection fail and
retry the detection, but that puts the burden on everything which does not
have a PIC.
Fortunately the ACPI/MADT table header has a flag field, which advertises
in bit 0 that the system is PCAT compatible, which means it has a legacy
8259 PIC.
Evaluate that bit and if set avoid the detection routine and keep the real
PIC installed, which then gets initialized (for nothing) and makes the rest
of the code with all the dependencies work again.
Fixes: e179f6914152 ("x86, irq, pic: Probe for legacy PIC and set legacy_pic appropriately")
Reported-by: David Lazar <dlazar@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Tested-by: David Lazar <dlazar@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Mario Limonciello <mario.limonciello@amd.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Closes: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218003
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/875y2u5s8g.ffs@tglx
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
3 files changed