Re: [PATCH v6 2/7] iwlwifi: mei: add the driver to allow cooperation with CSME

Emmanuel Grumbach [off-list ref] writes:

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Emmanuel Grumbach [off-list ref] writes:

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On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 1:58 PM Kalle Valo [off-list ref] wrote:

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Emmanuel Grumbach [off-list ref] writes:

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CSME in two words
-----------------
CSME stands for Converged Security and Management Engine. It is
a CPU on the chipset and runs a dedicated firmware.
AMT (Active Management Technology) is one of the applications
that run on that CPU. AMT allows to control the platform remotely.
Here is a partial list of the use cases:
* View the screen of the plaform, with keyboard and mouse (KVM)
* Attach a remote IDE device
* Have a serial console to the device
* Query the state of the platform
* Reset / shut down / boot the platform

[...]

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--- a/drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlwifi/Kconfig
+++ b/drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlwifi/Kconfig

@@ -92,6 +92,23 @@ config IWLWIFI_BCAST_FILTERING
        If unsure, don't enable this option, as some programs might
        expect incoming broadcasts for their normal operations.

+config IWLMEI
+     tristate "Intel Management Engine communication over WLAN"
+     depends on INTEL_MEI
+     depends on PM
+     depends on IWLMVM
+     help
+       Enables the iwlmei kernel module. This allows to communicate with
+       the Intel Management Engine over Wifi. This is supported starting
+       from Tiger Lake platforms and has been tested on 9260 devices only.
+       Enabling this option on a platform that has a different device and
+       has Wireless enabled on AMT can prevent WiFi from working correctly.

I don't understand the last sentence, please elaborate. Are you saying
that enabling CONFIG_IWLMEI will break wi-fi in some cases?

Since we don't support all the devices (yet), and we haven't integrated it
with all our devices, then yes, it shouldn't be enabled unless you know
exactly what platform this kernel runs on.

So if I'm understanding correctly, enabling CONFIG_IWLMEI will break
existing iwlwifi setups? Or am I missing something?

Ok, I'll share more details.
The coexistence between iwlwifi and CSME has never really been taken care
of. CSME is a feature meant for enterprise and those systems typically run
Windows which is why the Windows driver has had this feature for years
but not Linux.
iwlmei will not do anything if you don't have CSME configured to use the
WLAN device. Someone needs to actively configure CSME to use WLAN for
this to happen. Very few systems have this configuration.

So in a case when CSME/AMT WLAN (or whatever the feature under
discussion is called) is disabled in the BIOS and CONFIG_IWLMEI is
enabled in the kernel build, iwlwifi will work as before? This is the
most important part for me, we must not break people's network access
when they upgrade the kernel.

Now the question is what happens today (without iwlmei) when CSME is
configured to use WLAN compared to what happens with iwlmei, or in other
words, do we have a "regression"?

Today: there is some mechanism that allows iwlwifi to tell CSME not to touch
the device. This mechanism is not very well tested because only Linux uses it
and the assumption in Linux has almost always been that CSME is not
configured on systems that run Linux.

with iwlmei: we will be using the same interface as windows towards CSME which
is a well tested interface and we will be able to use the features
that CSME provides

Why the warning then? The integration with CSME has been done on 9260
only and not on newer devices. We do have plans to add support for
more devices but the current code doesn't support them.

What will happen if a user enables iwlmei on a system that has a
post-9260 device and CSME configured to use WLAN? Most probably, it'll
work, but this has not been tested yet

I hope you are printing an understandable info message when CSME is
enabled so that the situation is easy to notice and debug.

This configuration is far from the default and considered illegal by
Intel at this point I know that a user can always do something stupid,
but he can likewise disable mac80211 and complain that his wifi
doesn't work.

A user cannot compile iwlwifi unless mac80211 is enabled and likewise
iwlwifi module won't load unless mac80211 is loaded first. So we do have
checks for a lot of stuff.

My suggestion is to add a WARNING (or an dev_err print) in iwlwifi if
we detect this situation so that it'll be very easy to catch this
problem in the configuration.

Heh, exactly what I was thinking above.

The only way to prevent this situation would be to know what device
the user has from iwlmei in the mei bus enumeration but this is
unfortunately not possible.

I hope that made things clearer. I know all this is confusing, many
pieces of details that I hoped I wouldn't have to bore you with :)

It would have been a lot easier and faster to mention all this in the
commit logs from the beginning. Dumping me patches without commit logs
and no clear explanation is not really building confidence for me.

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