Recent Intel chipsets including Skylake and ApolloLake have a special
ITSSPRC register which allows the 8254 PIT to be gated. When gated, the
8254 registers can still be programmed as normal, but there are no IRQ0
timer interrupts.
Some products such as the Connex L1430 and exone go Rugged E11 use this
register to ship with the PIT gated by default. This causes Linux to fail
to boot:
Kernel panic - not syncing: IO-APIC + timer doesn't work! Boot with
apic=debug and send a report.
The panic happens before the framebuffer is initialized, so to the user, it
appears as an early boot hang on a black screen.
Affected products typically have a BIOS option that can be used to enable
the 8254 and make Linux work (Chipset -> South Cluster Configuration ->
Miscellaneous Configuration -> 8254 Clock Gating), however it would be best
to make Linux support the no-8254 case.
Modern sytems allow to discover the TSC and local APIC timer frequencies,
so the calibration against the PIT is not required. These systems have
always running timers and the local APIC timer works also in deep power
states.
So the setup of the PIT including the IO-APIC timer interrupt delivery
checks are a pointless exercise.
Skip the PIT setup and the IO-APIC timer interrupt checks on these systems,
which avoids the panic caused by non ticking PITs and also speeds up the
boot process.
Thanks to Daniel for providing the changelog, initial analysis of the
problem and testing against a variety of machines.
Reported-by: Daniel Drake <drake@endlessm.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Tested-by: Daniel Drake <drake@endlessm.com>
Cc: bp@alien8.de
Cc: hpa@zytor.com
Cc: linux@endlessm.com
Cc: rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com
Cc: hdegoede@redhat.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190628072307.24678-1-drake@endlessm.com
c8c4076723