Re: [PATCH] powerpc/dma: Fix invalid DMA mmap behavior

From: Shawn Anastasio <shawn@anastas.io>
To: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>,
	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Alexey Kardashevskiy <aik@ozlabs.ru>,
	Sam Bobroff <sbobroff@linux.ibm.com>,
	"open list:IOMMU DRIVERS" <iommu@lists.linux-foundation.org>,
	Oliver O'Halloran <oohall@gmail.com>,
	linuxppc-dev <linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org>,
	Marek Szyprowski <m.szyprowski@samsung.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] powerpc/dma: Fix invalid DMA mmap behavior
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 14:23:28 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <ff0c5578-1cb4-af29-ca40-ef2c6b246d2f@anastas.io> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87ef2i6z99.fsf@concordia.ellerman.id.au>

On 7/22/19 7:16 AM, Michael Ellerman wrote:
> Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> writes:
>> On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 11:52 AM Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 10:49:34AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 01:45:16PM +1000, Oliver O'Halloran wrote:
>>>>>> Other than m68k, mips, and arm64, everybody else that doesn't have
>>>>>> ARCH_NO_COHERENT_DMA_MMAP set uses this default implementation, so
>>>>>> I assume this behavior is acceptable on those architectures.
>>>>>
>>>>> It might be acceptable, but there's no reason to use pgport_noncached
>>>>> if the platform supports cache-coherent DMA.
>>>>>
>>>>> Christoph (+cc) made the change so maybe he saw something we're missing.
>>>>
>>>> I always found the forcing of noncached access even for coherent
>>>> devices a little odd, but this was inherited from the previous
>>>> implementation, which surprised me a bit as the different attributes
>>>> are usually problematic even on x86.  Let me dig into the history a
>>>> bit more, but I suspect the righ fix is to default to cached mappings
>>>> for coherent devices.
>>>
>>> Ok, some history:
>>>
>>> The generic dma mmap implementation, which we are effectively still
>>> using today was added by:
>>>
>>> commit 64ccc9c033c6089b2d426dad3c56477ab066c999
>>> Author: Marek Szyprowski <m.szyprowski@samsung.com>
>>> Date:   Thu Jun 14 13:03:04 2012 +0200
>>>
>>>      common: dma-mapping: add support for generic dma_mmap_* calls
>>>
>>> and unconditionally uses pgprot_noncached in dma_common_mmap, which is
>>> then used as the fallback by dma_mmap_attrs if no ->mmap method is
>>> present.  At that point we already had the powerpc implementation
>>> that only uses pgprot_noncached for non-coherent mappings, and
>>> the arm one, which uses pgprot_writecombine if DMA_ATTR_WRITE_COMBINE
>>> is set and otherwise pgprot_dmacoherent, which seems to be uncached.
>>> Arm did support coherent platforms at that time, but they might have
>>> been an afterthought and not handled properly.
>>
>> Cache-coherent devices are still very rare on 32-bit ARM.
>>
>> Among the callers of dma_mmap_coherent(), almost all are in platform
>> specific device drivers that only ever run on noncoherent ARM SoCs,
>> which explains why nobody would have noticed problems.
>>
>> There is also a difference in behavior between ARM and PowerPC
>> when dealing with mismatched cacheability attributes: If the same
>> page is mapped as both cached and uncached to, this may
>> cause silent undefined behavior on ARM, while PowerPC should
>> enter a checkstop as soon as it notices.
> 
> On newer Power CPUs it's actually more like the ARM behaviour.
> 
> I don't know for sure that it will *never* checkstop but there are at
> least cases where it won't. There's some (not much) detail in the
> Power8/9 user manuals.

The issue was discovered due to sporadic checkstops on P9, so it
seems like it will happen at least sometimes.

> cheers