kern/108581: [sysctl] sysctl: hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest: Invalid argument

Daniel Dvorák dandee at hellteam.net
Thu Mar 26 13:11:08 PDT 2009


Hi all,

I found out this error on the other computers. Will it be helpful for
analyzing to send infromation about cpu, acpi table and so on ? Or is the
first example enough ?

DD

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephane E. Potvin [mailto:sepotvin at FreeBSD.org] 
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 4:04 PM
To: John Baldwin
Cc: Bruce Cran; Daniel Dvor(ák; freebsd-acpi at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: kern/108581: [sysctl] sysctl: hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest: Invalid
argument

John Baldwin wrote:
> On Thursday 26 March 2009 10:37:31 am Bruce Cran wrote:
>> On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:37:50 -0400
>> John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>>> No, the code is doing things differently on purpose (though I'm not 
>>> completely sure why).  For _CST it sets cpu_cx_count to the maximum 
>>> Cx level supported by any CPU in the system.  For non-_CST it sets 
>>> it to the maximum Cx level supported by all CPUs in the system.  I 
>>> think it is correct for cpu_cx_count to always start at 0 and only 
>>> be bumped up to a higher setting.  Setting it to 3 would be very 
>>> wrong for the _CST case as I've seen CPUs that support C4.
>> From briefly reading through the specifications I'd assumed the 
>> maximum power state was C3.
> 
> For the non _CST case that is all that is defined, yes.  However, _CST 
> is a variable length array of Cx states, so it can support arbitrary 
> numbers of states.
> 
>> I had thought the _CST block was wrong because in 
>> acpi_cpu_global_cx_lowest_sysctl it validates the new value against 
>> cpu_cx_count; if one CPU has a lower cx state than the others, then 
>> won't this tell the other CPUs to use an unsupported state?
> 
> It depends on if the CPU driver is smart enough to cap requests to
> sc->cpu_cx_count, though if it does presumably it would do that in the
> cx_generic case as well.  I'm not sure why it behaves differently for 
> the _CST case, but I do think it is on purpose at least rather than an 
> accidental bug.  Perhaps Nate can chime in with why?
> 

The intent when I added support for cx states on SMP systems was to use the
same maximum cx_state for all CPUs when _CST is not used (cx_generic
case) and to respect per-processor maximum cx_state when _CST is present and
can be used. This whole piece of code is really convoluted and there's been
a few errors found in it over time so I wouldn't be surprised if there were
some still lurking.

Could you send me privately a copy of your ASL and a verbose boot log?

Steph



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