[Skiboot] [PATCH v4 01/18] libstb/secureboot: use platform.terminate instead of hard abort

[Oliver O'Halloran]

On Mon, 2020-05-11 at 16:31 -0500, Eric Richter wrote:
> Halting the boot via an abort() call will cause the BMC to keep
> restarting the machine indefinitely.

The BMC is supposed to detect the host bootlooping and stop powering it
on after 5 or so.

> Ending via platform.terminate()
> should be cleaner and prevent needless bootloops.

abort() is a #defined as assert(0) which results in a call to
assert_fail():

void __noreturn assert_fail(const char *msg, const char *file,
                                unsigned int line, const char *function)
{
        static bool in_abort = false;

        (void)function;
        if (in_abort)
                for (;;) ;
        in_abort = true;

        /* snip comment */
        prlog(PR_EMERG, "assert failed at %s:%u: %s\n", file, line, msg);
        backtrace();

        /* Save crashing CPU details */
        opal_mpipl_save_crashing_pir();

        if (platform.terminate)
                platform.terminate(msg);

        for (;;) ;
}

So I'm not really seeing how this is an improvement. The terminate
callback is usually ipmi_terminate() which will also trigger an MPIPL
on the systems which support it. That might be the cause of your boot
loop?

Vasant, do you have anything to add?