[coreboot] AMD platform: IO-APIC => Local APIC delivery modes

[Andriy Gapon]

On 08/10/2016 20:35, Rudolf Marek wrote:
> Hi Andriy,
> 
>> First, the hardware that I am talking about: it's a typical consumer system with
>> a Family 10h AMD processor, SB700 southbridge and 780G northbridge:
>> http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3004#sp
> 
> What superIO is it?

On that system it's ITE IT8718F.
On the other system that I tested (see my other post) it's IT8721F.


>> What I want to achieve is to get an interrupt generated by a SuperIO chip
>> (external to the chipset) delivered to a CPU as a NMI.
> 
> You could set a bit which enables NMI when IOCHKCK# is asserted. But, I guess
> the SuperIO wont generate it for you - unless you have own gadget.

Yes.  Also, to answer another of your questions, I want to have an interrupt
generated by the SuperIO's watchdog timer be delivered as an NMI.

>> So, the first thing I tried is simply to set the NMI delivery mode for the pin.
>> Unfortunately, that does not work, the system gets reset as soon as the
>> interrupt is generated.
>> So, my first question is: can that be made to work at all?
> 
> Did you set vector to 0x0 ? Maybe it did not like the rest of the fields?

I double-checked, all the bits seem to be correct as only the NMI mode bit has
to be set, all other have to be or can be zeroes: 0x0000000000000400 (using
64-bit format for two 32-bit registers of the redirection table entry).

>> So, I decided to not give up and to try to use the legacy interrupt mode to get
>> what I want.  I think that that's how Linux NMI watchdog driver used to work.
>> So, I programmed LINT0 and LINT1 for NMI delivery mode (on all cores, all two of
>> them), enabled legacy PIC (I guess that it's built into the chipset) and made
>> sure that the interrupt is unmasked.  But absolutely nothing happened when the
>> interrupt is generated.
>> From this I concluded that the PIC is not connected to the CPUs.
> 
> The PIC is "connected" to CPU via LINT0 if set to extINT. Or through the entry
> in IOAPIC.

Well, I was talking about the physical level (or something close to it).
Anyway, as it turned out I was wrong and the PIC is actually connected both to
the LINT0 pin of the CPU and pin 0 of the I/O APIC.


>> I think that this is an interesting discovery: PIC's configuration affects how
>> the IO-APIC communicates to the Local APICs.
> 
> This has to do about Hypertransportspecification. Please have a look to
> 
> Table 103. x86 Interrupt Request Packet Format (HT spec version 1.1)
> There is this MT3 explained.

Thank you for the pointer!  I will have a look.

>> I went over the BKDG and SB7x0 documentation (RRG, RPG) and only PCI_Reg 62h of
>> device 20 function 0 in SB7x0 caught my eye.  Namely, K8_INTR, MT3_Set and
>> MT3_Auto bits.  They all are about K8 INTR [NMI] message.
>> On my system the register is set to 0x24, that is K8_INTR is set, but MT3_Set
>> and MT3_Auto are not...
> 
> So, this just helps to generate right format to HT bus... maybe the CPU is
> confused... and you will need to change it. Now it should be more clear what the
> MT3 means.

I will try to map those to the HT protocol details.

>> In the coreboot source code I see that the register is set up with exactly the
>> same value in src/southbridge/amd/sb700/early_setup.c.
>> And, for what it's worth, bit 5 (0x20 mask) is documented as "reserved".
> 
> Could be that it is something unrelated - Maybe leftover from SB600, where the
> bit is documented. It has to do something with SMI on USB.

Okay.

>> I hope that this was not a boring read.
> 
> Nope, it is was quite interesting. Why you need to trigger NMI by superIO?
> Maybe there is other solution. I think at least some silicon revisions of SB700
> had some magic bit which was triggering NMI if written.

As I wrote above, I want to create another variant of an "NMI watchdog".
Watchdog timers in ITE SuperIOs are able to either reset a system or to generate
an interrupt.  I want to use the latter option to get the NMI.

> You can perhaps generate NMI using MSI/MSI-X or HPET (i tried with this)

Actually, I tried that with SB700 and SB850 HPETs.  I configured a timer for an
FSB (=MSI, I guess) interrupt mode and set the delivery mode in the same fashion
as I would for an MSI interrupt.  The results were exactly the same as what I am
getting when setting IO-APIC redirection mode to NMI.
If you were able to get this stuff to work on a similar hardware, then I would
appreciate your advice.

Thank you very much!

-- 
Andriy Gapon