Re: [PATCH] PCI: tegra: Do not allocate MSI target memory

From: Vidya Sagar <vidyas@nvidia.com>
To: Lucas Stach <dev@lynxeye.de>, <bhelgaas@google.com>,
	<lorenzo.pieralisi@arm.com>, <treding@nvidia.com>,
	<swarren@nvidia.com>, <mperttunen@nvidia.com>,
	<jonathanh@nvidia.com>
Cc: <linux-tegra@vger.kernel.org>, <linux-pci@vger.kernel.org>,
	<kthota@nvidia.com>, <mmaddireddy@nvidia.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] PCI: tegra: Do not allocate MSI target memory
Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2019 08:20:27 +0530	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <6ee0919a-504f-ae76-5995-a9eae505ef90@nvidia.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <d0e83ca1648a3ec80c01bc5e6708286f9d891580.camel@lynxeye.de>

On 3/1/2019 8:26 PM, Lucas Stach wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 01.03.2019, 08:45 +0530 schrieb Vidya Sagar:
>> On 3/1/2019 12:32 AM, Lucas Stach wrote:
>>> Am Donnerstag, den 28.02.2019, 20:30 +0530 schrieb Vidya Sagar:
>>>> The PCI host bridge found on Tegra SoCs doesn't require the MSI target
>>>> address to be backed by physical system memory. Writes are intercepted
>>>> within the controller and never make it to the memory pointed to.
>>>>
>>>> Since no actual system memory is required, remove the allocation of a
>>>> single page and hardcode the MSI target address with a special address
>>>> on a per-SoC basis. Ideally this would be an address to an MMIO memory
>>>> region (such as where the controller's register are located). However,
>>>> those addresses don't work reliably across all Tegra generations. The
>>>> only set of addresses that work consistently are those that point to
>>>> external memory.
>>>>
>>>> This is not ideal, since those addresses could technically be used for
>>>> DMA and hence be confusing. However, the first page of external memory
>>>> is unlikely to be used and special enough to avoid confusion.
>>> So you are trading a slight memory waste of a single page against a
>>> sporadic (and probably hard to debug) DMA failure if any device happens
>>> to initiate DMA to the first page of physical memory? That does not
>>> sound like a good deal...
>>>
>>> Also why would the first page of external memory be unlikely to be
>>> used?
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Lucas
>> We are not wasting single page of memory here and if any device's DMA is
>> trying to access it, it will still go through. Its just that we are using that
>> same address for MSI (note that MSI writes don't go beyond PCIe IP as they get
>> decoded at PCIe IP level itself and only an interrupt
>> goes to CPU) and that might be a bit confusing as same address is used
>> as normal memory as well as MSI target address. Since there can never be any
>> issue with this would you suggest to remove the last paragraph from commit
>> description?
> How does the core distinguish between a normal DMA memory write and a
> MSI? If I remember the PCIe spec correctly, there aren't any
> differences between the two besides the target address.
>
> So if you now set a non-reserved region of memory to decode as a MSI at
> the PCIe host controller level, wouldn't this lead to normal DMA
> transactions to this address being wrongfully turned into an MSI and
> the write not reaching the targeted location?
>
> Regards,
> Lucas

You are correct that core cannot distinguish between a normal DMA memory and
MSI. In that case, the only way I see is to alloc memory using 
dma_alloc_coherent()
and use the IOVA as the MSI target address. That way, a page gets 
reserved (in a way wasted
also as the MSI writes don't really make it to RAM) and there won't be 
any address
overlaps with normal DMA writes. I'll push a patch for it.

Thanks,
Vidya Sagar