From f6365201d8a21fb347260f89d6e9b3e718d63c70 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Len Brown Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:49:17 -0700 Subject: x86: Remove the ancient and deprecated disable_hlt() and enable_hlt() facility The X86_32-only disable_hlt/enable_hlt mechanism was used by the 32-bit floppy driver. Its effect was to replace the use of the HLT instruction inside default_idle() with cpu_relax() - essentially it turned off the use of HLT. This workaround was commented in the code as: "disable hlt during certain critical i/o operations" "This halt magic was a workaround for ancient floppy DMA wreckage. It should be safe to remove." H. Peter Anvin additionally adds: "To the best of my knowledge, no-hlt only existed because of flaky power distributions on 386/486 systems which were sold to run DOS. Since DOS did no power management of any kind, including HLT, the power draw was fairly uniform; when exposed to the much hhigher noise levels you got when Linux used HLT caused some of these systems to fail. They were by far in the minority even back then." Alan Cox further says: "Also for the Cyrix 5510 which tended to go castors up if a HLT occurred during a DMA cycle and on a few other boxes HLT during DMA tended to go astray. Do we care ? I doubt it. The 5510 was pretty obscure, the 5520 fixed it, the 5530 is probably the oldest still in any kind of use." So, let's finally drop this. Signed-off-by: Len Brown Signed-off-by: Josh Boyer Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Acked-by: "H. Peter Anvin" Acked-by: Alan Cox Cc: Stephen Hemminger Cc: Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/tip-3rhk9bzf0x9rljkv488tloib@git.kernel.org [ If anyone cares then alternative instruction patching could be used to replace HLT with a one-byte NOP instruction. Much simpler. ] Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar --- Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt | 8 -------- 1 file changed, 8 deletions(-) (limited to 'Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt') diff --git a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt index 0cad4803ffac..7c950d48d76e 100644 --- a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt +++ b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt @@ -6,14 +6,6 @@ be removed from this file. --------------------------- -What: x86 floppy disable_hlt -When: 2012 -Why: ancient workaround of dubious utility clutters the - code used by everybody else. -Who: Len Brown - ---------------------------- - What: CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE, and its ability to call APM BIOS in idle When: 2012 Why: This optional sub-feature of APM is of dubious reliability, -- cgit v1.2.3