Implementing a system call for CPU hotplug on RPI3/ModelB - linux

Question

My goal is to implement a system call in linux kernel that enables/disables a CPU core.
First, I implemented a system call that disbales CPU3 in a 4-core system.
The system call code is as follows:
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/slab.h>
#include <asm/uaccess.h>
#include <asm/unistd.h>
#include <linux/cpumask.h>
asmlinkage long sys_new_syscall(void)
{
unsigned int cpu3 = 3;
set_cpu_online (cpu3, false) ; /* clears the CPU in the cpumask */
printk ("CPU%u is offline\n", cpu3);
return 0;
}
The system call was registered correctly in the kernel and I enabled 'cpu hotplug' feature during kernel configuration ( See picture )
Kernel configuration:
The kernel was build . But when I check the system call using test.c :
#include <stdio.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <sys/syscall.h>
#include <unistd.h>
long new_syscall(void)
{
return syscall(394);
}
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
long int a = new_syscall();
printf("System call returned %ld\n", a);
return 0;
}
The OS frezzes !
What am I doing wrong ?

Answer 1

why would you want to implement a dedicated syscall? the standard way of offlining cpus is through writes to sysfs. in the extremely unlikely case there is a valid reason to create a dedicated syscall you will have to check how offlining works under the hood and repeat that.
set_cpu_online (cpu3, false) ; /* clears the CPU in the cpumask */
your own comment strongly suggests this is too simplistic. for instance what if the thread executing this is running on said cpu? what about threads which are queued on it?
and so on

Answer 2

This is kind of an old topic, but you can put a CPU up/down in kernel land by using the functions cpu_up(cpu_id) and cpu_down(cpu_id), from include/linux/cpu.h.
It seems that set_cpu_online is not exported since it doesn't seems to be safe from other kernel parts stand point (it doesn't consider process affinity and other complexities, for example).
So, your system call could be written as:
asmlinkage long sys_new_syscall(void)
{
unsigned int cpu3 = 3;
cpu_down(cpu3) ; /* clears the CPU in the cpumask */
printk ("CPU%u is offline\n", cpu3);
return 0;
}
I have an example module using those methods here: https://github.com/pappacena/cpuautoscaling.