kernel 2.6.15: cpm_uart driver broken?

[David Jander]

Hi Kenneth,

On Tuesday 18 April 2006 21:19, Kenneth Poole wrote:
> Regarding DMA allocation for CPM uarts, we had a similar issue with our
> MPC857T and MPC885 boards. I think the real problem is that
> bus_to_virt() and virt_to_bus() don't work on 8xx platforms for
> addresses allocated using dma_alloc_coherent(). We had a previous
> discussion Pantelis Antoniou and he agreed that the use of bus_to_virt()
> and virt_to_bus() should be deprecated. This is also recommended in the
> whitepaper series that discussed porting device drivers from 2.4 to 2.6.

You are right! I hadn't noticed the (implicit) use of virt_to_bus() in 
cpm_uart_core.c. In the case that "((unsigned long)addr >= CPM_ADDR)", the 
address isn't translated, that's why the uart keeps sending lots of 0xff's 
instead of real data: There is empty flash at that adress (after 0xff100000)! 
This also explains why the system hangs when I set CONFIG_CONSISTENT_START to 
0xfd100000, because then the CPM will access unadressed space.

Vitaly: Is it true that your ADS boards both have 
IMMAP_ADDR < CONFIG_CONSISTENT_START ?
That would explain why those do work.
On the PQ2's dma_alloc_coherent(), behaves differently, so they might also 
work.

In fact, bus_to_virt(), which is also used, does nothing more than adding 
KERNELBASE to the address, so a!=bus_to_virt(virt_to_bus(a)) if 'a' is 
obtained by anything other than kmalloc(). So if 'a' is obtained from 
dma_alloc_coherent(), will bus_to_virt(virt_to_bus(a)) at least yield a 
correctly mapped virtual address?
I am asking, because line 263 of cpm_uart_core.c does exactly this, and it 
smells ;-)

> What we did was use dma_alloc_coherent() in cpm_uart_cpm1.c, saving
> dma_addr in the pinfo structure. The in cpm_uart_core.c, we use dma_addr
> as the base address for the cbd_bufaddr values in each of the
> descriptors. The software, when accessing the DMA buffers, uses mem_addr
> as the base, applying the same offset computed previously for the dma
> addresses. This technique is used in other drivers all over 2.6.

Sounds like the correct thing to do, but do you (by any chance) have a patch 
for this change, to share?

Thanks a lot to everyone for their comments and help.

Greetings,

-- 
David Jander