Re: microcode loading got really slow.

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Thu, 23 May 2013 15:48:52 +0530,
anish singh wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> wrote:
> > At Thu, 23 May 2013 10:06:56 +0200,
> > Takashi Iwai wrote:
> >>
> >> At Thu, 23 May 2013 15:45:32 +0800,
> >> Ming Lei wrote:
> >> >
> >> > On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:
> >> > >  > On 05/21/2013 04:03 PM, Dave Jones wrote:
> >> > >  >
> >> > >  > [   72.318133] microcode: CPU1 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x6
> >> > >  > [  132.446449] microcode: CPU2 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x6
> >> > >  > [  192.573101] microcode: CPU3 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x6
> >> > >  > [  252.702055] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.00 <tigran@aivazian.fsnet.co.uk>, Peter Oruba
> >> > >  >
> >> > >  > For some reason the events for udev seem to be getting delayed 60s
> >> > >  > for each core.
> >> > >
> >> > > Screwed up my .config, and had CONFIG_FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER inadvertantly set
> >> > > Odd though that it causes that 60 second delay, given that it's supposedly a
> >> > > 'fallback' when the direct loading fails.
> >> >
> >> > udevd has the ugly problem previously at some situations(for example,
> >> > request_firmware called in probe(), and that is why direct loading is
> >> > introduced),
> >> > but not sure why the direct loading is failed first.
> >>
> >> The microcode update is optional, so it's no error even if the
> >> microcode firmwares are not found.
> >>
> >> But yes, this seems happening during the module probing.  The lines
> >> "microcde: CPU..." show before "microcode: Microcode Update
> >> Driver...", which means the f/w loading has been done before finishing
> >> the module load.
> >>
> >> I thought (or hoped) this mess (60s stalls) was fixed in the recent
> >> udev, but apparently not...?
> >
> > Thinking on this again, if the user-space continues to be broken in
> > that point, we should provide request_firmware() variant without udev,
> > e.g. request_firmware_direct(), and use it in known places like this?
> Is it not already there?I was thinking that some time back this support
> was added.

My point is the function that *only* uses the direct loading without
fallback to user mode helper.


Takashi