Re: [PATCH 0/3] ARM: v7: get rid of boot time mini stack

On Tue, 9 Feb 2021 at 00:12, Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, 8 Feb 2021, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:

quoted

The v7 boot code uses a small chunk of BSS to preserve some register
contents across a call to v7_invalidate_l1 that occurs with the MMU and
caches disabled. Memory accesses in such cases are tricky on v7+, given
that the architecture permits some unintuitive behaviors (it is
implementation defined whether accesses done with the MMU and caches off
may hit in the caches, and on SoCs that incorporate off-core system
caches, this behavior appears to be different even between cache
levels). Also, cache invalidation is not safe under virtualization if
the intent is to retain stores issued directly to DRAM, given that the
hypervisor may upgrade invalidate operations to clean+invalidate,
resulting in DRAM contents to be overwritte by the dirty cachelines that
we were trying to evict in the first place.

So let's address this issue, by removing the need for this stack to
exist in the first place: v7_invalidate_l1 can be rewritten to use fewer
registers, which means fewer registers need to be preserved, and we have
enough spare registers available.

That is excellent.

I wonder why r1-r3 were preserved though.

r1 and r2 are documented in head.S as

         * The processor init function will be called with:
         *  r1 - machine type
         *  r2 - boot data (atags/dt) pointer

but preserving the value of r3 does not seem necessary. Perhaps this
is a leftover from old code?

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