Re: [PATCH] i2c: piix4: Replace piix4_smbus driver's cd6h/cd7h port io accesses with mmio accesses

[Terry Bowman <Terry.Bowman@amd.com>]

Hi Jean and Guenter,

This is a gentle reminder to review my previous response when possible. Thanks!

Regards,
Terry

On 12/13/21 11:48 AM, Terry Bowman wrote:
> Hi Jean and Guenter,
> 
> Jean, Thanks for your responses. I added comments below.
> 
> I added Guenter to this email because his input is needed for adding the same
> changes to the sp5100_tco driver. The sp5100_tco and piix4_smbus driver
> must use the same synchronization logic for the shared register.
> 
> On 11/5/21 11:05, Jean Delvare wrote:
>> On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 18:37:20 +0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
>>> More generally, I am worried about the overall design. The driver
>>> originally used per-access I/O port requesting because keeping the I/O
>>> ports busy all the time would prevent other drivers from working. Do we
>>> still need to do the same with the new code? If it is possible and safe
>>> to have a permanent mapping to the memory ports, that would be a lot
>>> faster.
>>>
> 
> Permanent mapping would likely improve performance but will not provide the
> needed synchronization. As you mentioned below the sp5100 driver only uses
> the DECODEEN register during initialization but the access must be
> synchronized or an i2c transaction or sp5100_tco timer enable access may be
> lost. I considered alternatives but most lead to driver coupling or considerable
> complexity.
> 
>>> On the other hand, the read-modify-write cycle in
>>> piix4_setup_sb800_smba() is unsafe if 2 drivers can actually call
>>> request_mem_region() on the same memory area successfully.
>>>
>>> I'm not opposed to taking your patch with minimal changes (as long as
>>> the code is safe) and working on performance improvements later.
>>
> 
> I confirmed through testing the request_mem_region() and request_muxed_region() 
> macros provide exclusive locking. One difference between the 2 macros is the 
> flag parameter, IORESOURCE_MUXED. request_muxed_region() uses the 
> IORESOURCE_MUXED flag to retry the region lock if it's already locked. 
> request_mem_region() does not use the IORESOURCE_MUXED and as a result will 
> return -EBUSY immediately if the region is already locked.
> 
> I must clarify: the piix4_smbus v1 patch uses request_mem_region() which is not 
> correct because it doesn't retry locking an already locked region.  The driver 
> must support retrying the lock or piix4_smbus and sp5100_tco drivers may 
> potentially fail loading. I added proposed piix4_smbus v2 changes below to solve.
> 
> I propose reusing the existing request_*() framework from include/linux/ioport.h 
> and kernel/resource.c. A new helper macro will be required to provide an 
> interface to the "muxed" iomem locking functionality already present in 
> kernel/resource.c. The new macro will be similar to request_muxed_region() 
> but will instead operate on iomem. This should provide the same performance 
> while using the existing framework.
> 
> My plan is to add the following to include/linux/ioport.h in v2. This macro
> will add the interface for using "muxed" iomem support:
> #define request_mem_muxed_region(start,n,name)  __request_region(&iomem_resource, (start), (n), (name), IORESOURCE_MUXED)
> 
> The proposed changes will need review from more than one subsystem maintainer.
> The macro addition in include/linux/ioport.h would reside in a
> different maintainer's tree than this driver. The change to use the
> request_mem_muxed_region() macro will also be made to the sp5100_tco driver.
> The v2 review will include maintainers from subsystems owning piix4_smbus
> driver, sp5100_tco driver, and include/linux/ioport.h.
> 
> The details provided above are described in a piix4_smbus context but would also be 
> applied to the sp5100_tco driver for synchronizing the shared register.
> 
> Jean and Guenter, do you have concerns or changes you prefer to the proposal I 
> described above? 
> 
>> I looked some more at the code. I was thinking that maybe if the
>> registers accessed by the two drivers (i2c-piix4 and sp5100_tco) were
>> disjoint, then each driver could simply request subsets of the mapped
>> memory.
>>
>> Unfortunately, while most registers are indeed exclusively used by one
>> of the drivers, there's one register (0x00 = IsaDecode) which is used
>> by both. So this simple approach isn't possible.
>>
>> That being said, the register in question is only accessed at device
>> initialization time (on the sp5100_tco side, that's in function
>> sp5100_tco_setupdevice) and only for some devices (Embedded FCH). So
>> one approach which may work is to let the i2c-piix4 driver instantiate
>> the watchdog platform device in that case, instead of having sp5100_tco
>> instantiate its own device as is currently the case. That way, the
>> i2c-piix4 driver would request the "shared" memory area, perform the
>> initialization steps for both functions (SMBus and watchdog) and then
>> instantiate the watchdog device so that sp5100_tco gets loaded and goes
>> on with the runtime management of the watchdog device.
>>
>> If I'm not mistaken, this is what the i2c-i801 driver is already doing
>> for the watchdog device in all recent Intel chipsets. So maybe the same
>> approach can work for the i2c-piix4 driver for the AMD chipsets.
>> However I must confess that I did not try to do it nor am I familiar
>> with the sp5100_tco driver details, so maybe it's not possible for some
>> reason.
>>
>> If it's not possible then the only safe approach would be to migrate
>> i2c-piix4 and sp5100_tco to a true MFD setup with 3 separate drivers:
>> one new MFD PCI driver binding to the PCI device, providing access to
>> the registers with proper locking, and instantiating the platform
>> device, one driver for SMBus (basically i2c-piix4 converted to a
>> platform driver and relying on the MFD driver for register access) and
>> one driver for the watchdog (basically sp5100_tco converted to a
>> platform driver and relying on the MFD driver for register access).
>> That's a much larger change though, so I suppose we'd try avoid it if
>> at all possible.
>>