watchdog: hpwdt: Remove legacy NMI sourcing.
authorJerry Hoemann <jerry.hoemann@hpe.com>
Mon, 26 Feb 2018 03:22:20 +0000 (20:22 -0700)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Thu, 15 Mar 2018 09:54:22 +0000 (10:54 +0100)
commit77fbdd1e2a0c316481313caa4246b87a95aa0f31
tree1c60c9e136066f2e7401d54739e0c270c2b878d6
parent41da51dbc3721cae1b9796a422610366e9ff851c
watchdog: hpwdt: Remove legacy NMI sourcing.

commit 2b3d89b402b085b08498e896c65267a145bed486 upstream.

Gen8 and prior Proliant systems supported the "CRU" interface
to firmware.  This interfaces allows linux to "call back" into firmware
to source the cause of an NMI.  This feature isn't fully utilized
as the actual source of the NMI isn't printed, the driver only
indicates that the source couldn't be determined when the call
fails.

With the advent of Gen9, iCRU replaces the CRU. The call back
feature is no longer available in firmware.  To be compatible and
not attempt to call back into firmware on system not supporting CRU,
the SMBIOS table is consulted to determine if it is safe to
make the call back or not.

This results in about half of the driver code being devoted
to either making CRU calls or determing if it is safe to make
CRU calls.  As noted, the driver isn't really using the results of
the CRU calls.

Furthermore, as a consequence of the Spectre security issue, the
BIOS/EFI calls are being wrapped into Spectre-disabling section.
Removing the call back in hpwdt_pretimeout assists in this effort.

As the CRU sourcing of the NMI isn't required for handling the
NMI and there are security concerns with making the call back, remove
the legacy (pre Gen9) NMI sourcing and the DMI code to determine if
the system had the CRU interface.

Signed-off-by: Jerry Hoemann <jerry.hoemann@hpe.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Signed-off-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Signed-off-by: Wim Van Sebroeck <wim@iguana.be>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
drivers/watchdog/hpwdt.c