Some BIOSes use PMU resources, which can cause various bugs:
- Non-working or erratic PMU based statistics - the PMU can end up
counting the wrong thing, resulting in misleading statistics
- Profiling can stop working or it can profile the wrong thing
- A non-working or erratic NMI watchdog that cannot be relied on
- The kernel may disturb whatever thing the BIOS tries to use the
PMU for - possibly causing hardware malfunction in extreme cases.
- ... and other forms of potential misbehavior
Various forms of such misbehavior has been observed in practice - there are
BIOSes that just corrupt the PMU state, consequences be damned.
The PMU is a CPU resource that is handled by the kernel and the BIOS
stealing+corrupting it is not acceptable nor robust, so we detect it,
warn about it and further refuse to touch the PMU ourselves.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Jason Wessel <jason.wessel@windriver.com>
Cc: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
4407204c5c