a3b2cb30 broken panic reporting for qemu guests

[Nicholas Piggin]

On Fri, 01 Dec 2017 22:11:50 +1100
Michael Ellerman <mpe at ellerman.id.au> wrote:

> David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 02:23:43PM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:  
> >> On Wed, 29 Nov 2017 15:06:52 +1100
> >> David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:
> >>   
> >> > a3b2cb30 "powerpc: Do not call ppc_md.panic in fadump panic notifier"
> >> > purports to fix a problem when the kernel panics with fadump not
> >> > registered, but it breaks something else instead.  I _think_ it was
> >> > working on the incorrect assumption that ppc_md.panic was (or should
> >> > be) only used with fadump, but I'm not really sure.
> >> > 
> >> > Panic works with kdump enabled, and (I think) with fadump enabled).
> >> > However, with neither of these enabled, we always go to the generic
> >> > panic logic.  
> >> 
> >> Yeah thanks, I can't remember what assumption I was working on tbh.
> >>    
> >> > That's incorrect for PAPR guests - they should call ibm,os-term via
> >> > RTAS.  Under qemu this leads to a "GUEST_PANICKED" event notification
> >> > which higher-level management pays attention to.  Since a3b2cb30 we
> >> > now reboot instead of reporting that.
> >> > 
> >> > I believe it will also break panic for PS3 machines, but since that
> >> > platform basically no longer exists, we probably don't care.  
> >> 
> >> I (hope) it should just go down to the normal panic path and not do
> >> much worse than it already does -- although it won't print out that
> >> message.
> >>   
> >> > I'm not entirely sure how to fix this.  I _think_ what we want is to
> >> > call ppc_md.panic from a late panic notifier, the way this patch does
> >> > for fadump_panic_event() if fadump is registered.  
> >> 
> >> The problem I had there is that some of the printk and console stuff
> >> wasn't getting flushed out, so I was getting a blank screen. This was
> >> probably in conjunction with panicing from NMI context that we're now
> >> starting to introduce.
> >> 
> >> So it's a bit annoying. There's other ugliness we have for being unable
> >> to control panic code well enough from arch code
> >> (arch/powerpc/platforms/powernv/opal.c)
> >> 
> >> I guess a really minimal fix is to put an #ifdef powerpc down the bottom
> >> there (/me *cries*).  
> >
> > Um.. right.  I'm not really sure from that how to go forward from
> > here.  We want to fix this for RHEL7.5, which doesn't give us a lot of
> > time.
> >
> > Adding the #ifdef at the bottom of the generic panic code is gross,
> > but there's already a bunch of that, so maybe adequate until a better
> > solution can be found?  
> 
> I think you mean put an #ifdef at the bottom of panic(). If so that
> won't work. Our default panic_timeout is 180 so we never get to the
> bottom of panic(), we call emergency_restart().
> 
> You *could* put an #ifdef powerpc before that, but that's even more
> gross because it's in a different place to the sparc/s390 #ifdefs.
> 
> I notice we don't implement machine_emergency_restart(), it just
> becomes machine_restart(NULL).
> 
> So it seems like that's the place we should be hooking,
> machine_emergency_restart(). That's what x86 does.
> 
> But panic() is not the only caller of emergency_restart(), so it's not
> an entirely straight forward conversion.
> 
> So I think for 4.15 and 4.14 I'm inclined to revert. Then we can do a
> bigger rework for 4.16.
> 
> Nick that shouldn't break your original aim too badly I think? ie. worst
> case is we panic() but don't see the output if we came from NMI?

If the fix is not pretty obvious, then I guess revert. We actually
do have a bit of a regression though, since we've started marking
system reset interrupts as NMI. Previously a system reset would have
a better chance of printing something there.

So I wonder is an ifdef really all that much worse just because it's not
in the same exact place as the others? We do get bug reports that were
triggered by a system reset from hypervisor console. Hopefully they would
be running with crash dumps usually.

Thanks,
Nick