6f4eea9046
Introduce the "alternative" mechanism from ARM64 and x86 to apply the CPU vendors' errata solution at runtime. The main purpose of this patch is to provide a framework. Therefore, the implementation is quite basic for now so that some scenarios could not use this schemei, such as patching code to a module, relocating the patching code and heterogeneous CPU topology. Users could use the macro ALTERNATIVE to apply an errata to the existing code flow. In the macro ALTERNATIVE, users need to specify the manufacturer information(vendorid, archid, and impid) for this errata. Therefore, kernel will know this errata is suitable for which CPU core. During the booting procedure, kernel will select the errata required by the CPU core and then patch it. It means that the kernel only applies the errata to the specified CPU core. In this case, the vendor's errata does not affect each other at runtime. The above patching procedure only occurs during the booting phase, so we only take the overhead of the "alternative" mechanism once. This "alternative" mechanism is enabled by default to ensure that all required errata will be applied. However, users can disable this feature by the Kconfig "CONFIG_RISCV_ERRATA_ALTERNATIVE". Signed-off-by: Vincent Chen <vincent.chen@sifive.com> Reviewed-by: Anup Patel <anup@brainfault.org> Signed-off-by: Palmer Dabbelt <palmerdabbelt@google.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.