[PATCH 01/20] kernel/dma/direct: take DMA offset into account in dma_direct_supported

Benjamin Herrenschmidt benh at kernel.crashing.org
Thu Aug 23 09:59:18 AEST 2018


On Wed, 2018-08-22 at 08:53 +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 09:44:18AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > We do have the occasional device with things like 31-bit DMA
> > limitation. We know they happens to work because those systems
> > can't have enough memory to be a problem. This is why our current
> > DMA direct ops in powerpc just unconditionally return true on ppc32.
> > 
> > The test against a full 32-bit mask here will break them I think.
> > 
> > Thing is, I'm not sure I still have access to one of these things
> > to test, I'll have to dig (from memory things like b43 wifi).
> 
> Yeah, the other platforms that support these devices support ZONE_DMA
> to reliably handle these devices. But there is two other ways the
> current code would actually handle these fine despite the dma_direct
> checks:
> 
>  1) if the device only has physical addresses up to 31-bit anyway
>  2) by trying again to find a lower address.  But this only works
>     for coherent allocations and not streaming maps (unless we have
>     swiotlb with a buffer below 31-bits).
> 
> It seems powerpc can have ZONE_DMA, though and we will cover these
> devices just fine.  If it didn't have that the current powerpc
> code would not work either.

Not exactly. powerpc has ZONE_DMA covering all of system memory.

What happens in ppc32 is that we somewhat "know" that none of the
systems with those stupid 31-bit limited pieces of HW is capable of
having more than 2GB of memory anyway.

So we get away with just returning "1".

> 
> >  - What is this trying to achieve ?
> > 
> > 	/*
> > 	 * Various PCI/PCIe bridges have broken support for > 32bit DMA even
> > 	 * if the device itself might support it.
> > 	 */
> > 	if (dev->dma_32bit_limit && mask > phys_to_dma(dev, DMA_BIT_MASK(32)))
> > 		return 0;
> > 
> > IE, if the device has a 32-bit limit, we fail an attempt at checking
> > if a >32-bit mask works ? That doesn't quite seem to be the right thing
> > to do... Shouldn't this be in dma_set_mask() and just clamp the mask down ?
> > 
> > IE, dma_set_mask() is what a driver uses to establish the device capability,
> > so it makes sense tot have dma_32bit_limit just reduce that capability, not
> > fail because the device can do more than what the bridge can.... 
> 
> If your PCI bridge / PCIe root port doesn't support dma to addresses
> larger than 32-bit the device capabilities above that don't matter, it
> just won't work.  We have this case at least for some old VIA x86 chipsets
> and some relatively modern Xilinx FPGAs with PCIe.

Hrm... that's the usual confusion dma_capable() vs. dma_set_mask().

It's always been perfectly fine for a driver to do a dma_set_mask(64-
bit) on a system where the bridge can only do 32-bits ...

We shouldn't fail there, we should instead "clamp" the mask to 32-bit,
see what I mean ? It doesn't matter that the device itself is capable
of issuing >32 addresses, I agree, but what we need to express is that
the combination device+bridge doesn't want addresses above 32-bit, so
it's equivalent to making the device do a set_mask(32-bit).

This will succeed if the system can limit the addresses (for example
because memory is never above 32-bit) and will fail if the system
can't.

So that's equivalent of writing

	if (dev->dma_32bit_limit && mask > phys_to_dma(dev, DMA_BIT_MASK(32)))
		mask = phys_to_dma(dev, DMA_BIT_MASK(32)); 

Effectively meaning "don't give me addresses aboe 32-bit".

Still, your code doesn't check the mask against the memory size. Which
means it will fail for 32-bit masks even on systems that do not have
memory above 4G.

> >  - How is that file supposed to work on 64-bit platforms ? From what I can
> > tell, dma_supported() will unconditionally return true if the mask is
> > 32-bit or larger (appart from the above issue). This doesn't look right,
> > the mask needs to be compared to the max memory address. There are a bunch
> > of devices out there with masks anywhere bettween 40 and 64 bits, and
> > some of these will not work "out of the box" if the offseted top
> > of memory is beyond the mask limit. Or am I missing something ?
> 
> Your are not missing anything except for the history of this code.
> 
> Your observation is right, but there always has been the implicit
> assumption that architectures with more than 4GB of physical address
> space must either support and iommu or swiotlb and use that.  It's
> never been document anywhere, but I'm working on integrating all
> this code to make more sense.

Well, iommus can have bypass regions, which we also use for
performance, so we do at dma_set_mask() time "swap" the ops around, and
in that case, we do want to check the mask against the actual top of
memory...

Cheers,
Ben.




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