The X86_32-only disable_hlt/enable_hlt mechanism was used by the
32-bit floppy driver. Its effect was to replace the use of the
HLT instruction inside default_idle() with cpu_relax() - essentially
it turned off the use of HLT.
This workaround was commented in the code as:
"disable hlt during certain critical i/o operations"
"This halt magic was a workaround for ancient floppy DMA
wreckage. It should be safe to remove."
H. Peter Anvin additionally adds:
"To the best of my knowledge, no-hlt only existed because of
flaky power distributions on 386/486 systems which were sold to
run DOS. Since DOS did no power management of any kind,
including HLT, the power draw was fairly uniform; when exposed
to the much hhigher noise levels you got when Linux used HLT
caused some of these systems to fail.
They were by far in the minority even back then."
Alan Cox further says:
"Also for the Cyrix 5510 which tended to go castors up if a HLT
occurred during a DMA cycle and on a few other boxes HLT during
DMA tended to go astray.
Do we care ? I doubt it. The 5510 was pretty obscure, the 5520
fixed it, the 5530 is probably the oldest still in any kind of
use."
So, let's finally drop this.
Signed-off-by: Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Josh Boyer <jwboyer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/tip-3rhk9bzf0x9rljkv488tloib@git.kernel.org
[ If anyone cares then alternative instruction patching could be
used to replace HLT with a one-byte NOP instruction. Much simpler. ]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
f6365201d8