powerpc/pseries: Cancel RTAS event scan before firmware flash

The RTAS firmware flash update is conducted using an RTAS call that is
serialized by lock_rtas() which uses spin_lock. While the flash is in
progress, rtasd performs scan for any RTAS events that are generated by
the system. rtasd keeps scanning for the RTAS events generated on the
machine. This is performed via workqueue mechanism. The rtas_event_scan()
also uses an RTAS call to scan the events, eventually trying to acquire
the spin_lock before issuing the request.

The flash update takes a while to complete and during this time, any other
RTAS call has to wait. In this case, rtas_event_scan() waits for a long time
on the spin_lock resulting in a soft lockup.

Fix: Just before the flash update is performed, the queued rtas_event_scan()
work item is cancelled from the work queue so that there is no other RTAS
call issued while the flash is in progress. After the flash completes, the
system reboots and the rtas_event_scan() is rescheduled.

Signed-off-by: Suzuki Poulose <suzuki@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ravi Nittala <ravi.nittala@in.ibm.com>
Reported-by: Divya Vikas <divya.vikas@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/powerpc/kernel/rtas_flash.c b/arch/powerpc/kernel/rtas_flash.c
index e037c7494fd8..4174b4b23246 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/kernel/rtas_flash.c
+++ b/arch/powerpc/kernel/rtas_flash.c
@@ -568,6 +568,12 @@ static void rtas_flash_firmware(int reboot_type)
 	}
 
 	/*
+	 * Just before starting the firmware flash, cancel the event scan work
+	 * to avoid any soft lockup issues.
+	 */
+	rtas_cancel_event_scan();
+
+	/*
 	 * NOTE: the "first" block must be under 4GB, so we create
 	 * an entry with no data blocks in the reserved buffer in
 	 * the kernel data segment.