MTRR use in drivers

MTRR use in drivers

[H. Peter Anvin]

An awful lot of drivers, mostly DRI drivers, are still mucking with
MTRRs directly as opposed to using ioremap_wc() or similar interfaces.
In addition to the architecture dependency, this is really undesirable
because MTRRs are a limited resource, whereas page table attributes are not.

Furthermore, this perpetuates the need for the horrific hack known as
"MTRR cleanup".

What, if anything, can we do to clean up this mess?

	-hpa

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[Brice Goglin]

Le 21/06/2013 07:00, H. Peter Anvin a écrit :
> An awful lot of drivers, mostly DRI drivers, are still mucking with
> MTRRs directly as opposed to using ioremap_wc() or similar interfaces.
> In addition to the architecture dependency, this is really undesirable
> because MTRRs are a limited resource, whereas page table attributes are not.
>
> Furthermore, this perpetuates the need for the horrific hack known as
> "MTRR cleanup".
>
> What, if anything, can we do to clean up this mess?
>
> 	-hpa
>

The first network driver that used ioremap_wc() back in 2008 (myri10ge)
had to keep using MTRR because ioremap_wc() silently falls back to
ioremap_nocache() when PAT is disabled.

I asked about this in https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/5/31/42 and there was
some talk about putting the MTRR addition in the nocache fallback path
but I guess nobody implemented the idea.

Brice

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[H. Peter Anvin]

Why do you care about performance when PAT is disabled?

Brice Goglin <brice.goglin@gmail.com> wrote:

>Le 21/06/2013 07:00, H. Peter Anvin a écrit :
>> An awful lot of drivers, mostly DRI drivers, are still mucking with
>> MTRRs directly as opposed to using ioremap_wc() or similar
>interfaces.
>> In addition to the architecture dependency, this is really
>undesirable
>> because MTRRs are a limited resource, whereas page table attributes
>are not.
>>
>> Furthermore, this perpetuates the need for the horrific hack known as
>> "MTRR cleanup".
>>
>> What, if anything, can we do to clean up this mess?
>>
>> 	-hpa
>>
>
>The first network driver that used ioremap_wc() back in 2008 (myri10ge)
>had to keep using MTRR because ioremap_wc() silently falls back to
>ioremap_nocache() when PAT is disabled.
>
>I asked about this in https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/5/31/42 and there was
>some talk about putting the MTRR addition in the nocache fallback path
>but I guess nobody implemented the idea.
>
>Brice

-- 
Sent from my mobile phone. Please excuse brevity and lack of formatting.

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Sun, 23 Jun 2013, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Why do you care about performance when PAT is disabled?

It will regress already slow boxes.  We blacklist a LOT of P4s, PMs, etc and
nobody ever took the pain to track down which ones of those actually have
PAT+MTRR aliasing bugs.

These boxes have boards like the Radeon X300, which needs either PAT or MTRR
to not become unusable...

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 06/23/2013 12:29 PM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Jun 2013, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> Why do you care about performance when PAT is disabled?
> 
> It will regress already slow boxes.  We blacklist a LOT of P4s, PMs, etc and
> nobody ever took the pain to track down which ones of those actually have
> PAT+MTRR aliasing bugs.
> 
> These boxes have boards like the Radeon X300, which needs either PAT or MTRR
> to not become unusable...
> 

We're talking hardware which is now many years old, but this is causing
very serious problems on real, modern hardware.  As far as I understand
it, too, the blacklisting was precautionary (the only bug that I
personally know about is a performance bug, where WC would be
incorrectly converted to UC.)

We need a way forward here.  If it is the only way I think we would have
to sacrifice the old machines, but perhaps something can be worked out
(e.g. if PAT is disabled, fall back to MTRRs if available for ioremap_wc()).

	-hpa

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[Dave Airlie]

>>> Why do you care about performance when PAT is disabled?

breaking old boxes just because, is just going to get reverted when I
get the first regression report that you broke old boxes.

Andy Lutomirski just submitted a bunch of patches to clean up the DRM
usage of mtrrs, they are in drm-next, afaik we no longer add them on
PAT systems.

Dave.

>>
>> It will regress already slow boxes.  We blacklist a LOT of P4s, PMs, etc and
>> nobody ever took the pain to track down which ones of those actually have
>> PAT+MTRR aliasing bugs.
>>
>> These boxes have boards like the Radeon X300, which needs either PAT or MTRR
>> to not become unusable...
>>
>
> We're talking hardware which is now many years old, but this is causing
> very serious problems on real, modern hardware.  As far as I understand
> it, too, the blacklisting was precautionary (the only bug that I
> personally know about is a performance bug, where WC would be
> incorrectly converted to UC.)
>
> We need a way forward here.  If it is the only way I think we would have
> to sacrifice the old machines, but perhaps something can be worked out
> (e.g. if PAT is disabled, fall back to MTRRs if available for ioremap_wc()).
>
>         -hpa
>
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Re: MTRR use in drivers

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 06/23/2013 01:30 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>>> Why do you care about performance when PAT is disabled?
> 
> breaking old boxes just because, is just going to get reverted when I
> get the first regression report that you broke old boxes.
> 

Not "just because", but *if* the choice is between breaking old boxes
and breaking new boxes I'll take the latter.

> Andy Lutomirski just submitted a bunch of patches to clean up the DRM
> usage of mtrrs, they are in drm-next, afaik we no longer add them on
> PAT systems.

Fantastic news.  No issue, then, and no need to break anything.

The only problem I see with having ioremap_wc() installing an MTRR on
non-PAT, rather than pushing that into the drivers which is clearly not
the right thing, is that we will need a hook to uninstall it when the
mapping is destroyed.

	-hpa

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[Dave Airlie]

>> breaking old boxes just because, is just going to get reverted when I
>> get the first regression report that you broke old boxes.
>>
>
> Not "just because", but *if* the choice is between breaking old boxes
> and breaking new boxes I'll take the latter.
>

But Linus won't so your choice doesn't matter.

>> Andy Lutomirski just submitted a bunch of patches to clean up the DRM
>> usage of mtrrs, they are in drm-next, afaik we no longer add them on
>> PAT systems.
>
> Fantastic news.  No issue, then, and no need to break anything.

Granted I haven't tested Andy's patches on my AGP boxes, and I intend to,
if they do cause any regressions he'll be working them out :-)

Dave.

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 06/23/2013 01:54 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>> breaking old boxes just because, is just going to get reverted when I
>>> get the first regression report that you broke old boxes.
>>>
>>
>> Not "just because", but *if* the choice is between breaking old boxes
>> and breaking new boxes I'll take the latter.
>>
> 
> But Linus won't so your choice doesn't matter.

I hate to break it to you, but we regress on ancient hardware all the
time.  Optimization work gets done on modern machines, so the sweet spot
keeps moving.  In particular, if supporting ancient hardware means
leaving a lot of performance on modern hardware on the table, we may
have to take that penalty.

Fortunately, most of the time we don't have to.

	-hpa

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[Dave Airlie]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:58 AM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:
> On 06/23/2013 01:54 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>>> breaking old boxes just because, is just going to get reverted when I
>>>> get the first regression report that you broke old boxes.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Not "just because", but *if* the choice is between breaking old boxes
>>> and breaking new boxes I'll take the latter.
>>>
>>
>> But Linus won't so your choice doesn't matter.
>
> I hate to break it to you, but we regress on ancient hardware all the
> time.  Optimization work gets done on modern machines, so the sweet spot
> keeps moving.  In particular, if supporting ancient hardware means
> leaving a lot of performance on modern hardware on the table, we may
> have to take that penalty.
>
> Fortunately, most of the time we don't have to.

Big difference between optimization sweet-spot and deliberately
breaking older systems. This is firmly in the second category, lots of
Intel hardware stops being useable when MTRR and PAT isn't working,
so much so we had to a warning to the driver when we detect such a thing.

Dave.

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 1:38 PM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:
> On 06/23/2013 01:30 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>>>> Why do you care about performance when PAT is disabled?
>>
>> breaking old boxes just because, is just going to get reverted when I
>> get the first regression report that you broke old boxes.
>>
>
> Not "just because", but *if* the choice is between breaking old boxes
> and breaking new boxes I'll take the latter.
>
>> Andy Lutomirski just submitted a bunch of patches to clean up the DRM
>> usage of mtrrs, they are in drm-next, afaik we no longer add them on
>> PAT systems.
>
> Fantastic news.  No issue, then, and no need to break anything.
>
> The only problem I see with having ioremap_wc() installing an MTRR on
> non-PAT, rather than pushing that into the drivers which is clearly not
> the right thing, is that we will need a hook to uninstall it when the
> mapping is destroyed.

I have trouble believing that this will ever work well -- MTRRs have
crazy alignment requirements and interactions with other MTRRs, and a
few drivers have to jump through hoops to set up the right MTRRs.
There aren't really enough to break down every mapping.

My patches (in dri-next) add functions arch_wc_phys_add and
arch_wc_phys_del that do nothing except on x86 with MTRRs on and PAT
off, in which case they try to add a WC MTRR.  That way the handful of
drivers that need WC for performance on old hardware can try (and
possibly fail, depending on the usual vagaries of MTRRs).  With my
patches applied, DRM and agpgart no longer touch MTRRs at all with PAT
on.

I didn't get around to excising MTRRs from the non-DRM video drivers
or from the few odd cases like myri10ge.

This stuff is painful to test.  The only drivers I can really test are
i915 and radeon.  I have a myri10ge device, but it's on a production
server.  I also have several mgag200 devices, but they're in a
super-secret-locked-down datacenter a few thousand miles away, and
trying to gauge framebuffer performance over Dell and/or HP's crappy
remoting interface is a lost cause.  I'm not sure that my oldest
computer (locked in a basement in another state) is old enough to have
an AGP port.

--Andy

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Sun, 23 Jun 2013, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 06/23/2013 12:29 PM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > On Sun, 23 Jun 2013, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> >> Why do you care about performance when PAT is disabled?
> > 
> > It will regress already slow boxes.  We blacklist a LOT of P4s, PMs, etc and
> > nobody ever took the pain to track down which ones of those actually have
> > PAT+MTRR aliasing bugs.
> > 
> > These boxes have boards like the Radeon X300, which needs either PAT or MTRR
> > to not become unusable...
> 
> We're talking hardware which is now many years old, but this is causing
> very serious problems on real, modern hardware.  As far as I understand
> it, too, the blacklisting was precautionary (the only bug that I
> personally know about is a performance bug, where WC would be
> incorrectly converted to UC.)

And as far as I could find from Intel's not-that-complete public
"specification updates", we are applying the errata workaround to a few more
processors than strictly required, but since I have no idea how to write a
test case, I can't whitelist the 3rd-gen Pentium M on my T43, nor can I get
ThinkPad owners to test it for us on 1st and 2nd-gen Pentium M and report
back.

> We need a way forward here.  If it is the only way I think we would have
> to sacrifice the old machines, but perhaps something can be worked out
> (e.g. if PAT is disabled, fall back to MTRRs if available for ioremap_wc()).

I'd be quite happy with a MTRR fallback.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 06/23/2013 02:56 PM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> 
> And as far as I could find from Intel's not-that-complete public
> "specification updates", we are applying the errata workaround to a few more
> processors than strictly required, but since I have no idea how to write a
> test case, I can't whitelist the 3rd-gen Pentium M on my T43, nor can I get
> ThinkPad owners to test it for us on 1st and 2nd-gen Pentium M and report
> back.
> 

Which specific erratum are you referring to, here?  The "WC becomes UC"
erratum?  I don't think there is a sane testcase for it since it needs a
very complicated setup to trigger.

	-hpa

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Sun, 23 Jun 2013, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 06/23/2013 02:56 PM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > 
> > And as far as I could find from Intel's not-that-complete public
> > "specification updates", we are applying the errata workaround to a few more
> > processors than strictly required, but since I have no idea how to write a
> > test case, I can't whitelist the 3rd-gen Pentium M on my T43, nor can I get
> > ThinkPad owners to test it for us on 1st and 2nd-gen Pentium M and report
> > back.
> 
> Which specific erratum are you referring to, here?  The "WC becomes UC"
> erratum?  I don't think there is a sane testcase for it since it needs a
> very complicated setup to trigger.

There are at least two different nasty PAT issues that are not always
critical, and one that outright hangs the processor (if the unsupported
aliasing of WB with UC/WC happens).

Interestingly enough, most of the P4-Xeons and P4 do not appear to have the
"WC becomes UC" errata.

However, LOTS of P4, M-P4, Xeon PIII, Xeon, and Pentium M have a bug where
the four highest entries in the PAT table are inactive (aliased to the four
lowest entries) in mode B (PSE) and mode C (PAE) for 4k pages.  They work
fine for large pages.

Also, lots of them can hang if you ever alias WB with UC or WC (which is
apparently an unsupported configuration anyway, or so it says in the
errata).

There are other weird aliasing nasties, such as one where you get memory
corruption if you alias WB data with code (being accessed as UC or WC) in
the same cacheline, and some stuff such as weirdness should the page table
be on WC memory...

I can track down most of the CPUIDs involved if you want, but someone from
Intel would be better (I assume they actually have access to the errata
documentation in some less idiotic way than reading a ton of badly indexed
PDFs that take forever to find in their site).

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: MTRR use in drivers

[H. Peter Anvin]

The aliasing doesn't matter for Linux because we map the high and low half the same.

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@hmh.eng.br> wrote:

>On Sun, 23 Jun 2013, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> On 06/23/2013 02:56 PM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
>> > 
>> > And as far as I could find from Intel's not-that-complete public
>> > "specification updates", we are applying the errata workaround to a
>few more
>> > processors than strictly required, but since I have no idea how to
>write a
>> > test case, I can't whitelist the 3rd-gen Pentium M on my T43, nor
>can I get
>> > ThinkPad owners to test it for us on 1st and 2nd-gen Pentium M and
>report
>> > back.
>> 
>> Which specific erratum are you referring to, here?  The "WC becomes
>UC"
>> erratum?  I don't think there is a sane testcase for it since it
>needs a
>> very complicated setup to trigger.
>
>There are at least two different nasty PAT issues that are not always
>critical, and one that outright hangs the processor (if the unsupported
>aliasing of WB with UC/WC happens).
>
>Interestingly enough, most of the P4-Xeons and P4 do not appear to have
>the
>"WC becomes UC" errata.
>
>However, LOTS of P4, M-P4, Xeon PIII, Xeon, and Pentium M have a bug
>where
>the four highest entries in the PAT table are inactive (aliased to the
>four
>lowest entries) in mode B (PSE) and mode C (PAE) for 4k pages.  They
>work
>fine for large pages.
>
>Also, lots of them can hang if you ever alias WB with UC or WC (which
>is
>apparently an unsupported configuration anyway, or so it says in the
>errata).
>
>There are other weird aliasing nasties, such as one where you get
>memory
>corruption if you alias WB data with code (being accessed as UC or WC)
>in
>the same cacheline, and some stuff such as weirdness should the page
>table
>be on WC memory...
>
>I can track down most of the CPUIDs involved if you want, but someone
>from
>Intel would be better (I assume they actually have access to the errata
>documentation in some less idiotic way than reading a ton of badly
>indexed
>PDFs that take forever to find in their site).

-- 
Sent from my mobile phone. Please excuse brevity and lack of formatting.