Re: 2.6.25 DMA: Out of SW-IOMMU space - Asus M2N32 AMD 8GB memory

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Sun Aug 24 2008 - 17:53:11 EST


Jari Aalto wrote:
Krzysztof Halasa <khc@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

>From Debian stock kernel:

$ grep -Ei 'iommu|agp' /boot/config-2.6.25-2-amd64
CONFIG_GART_IOMMU=y
CONFIG_CALGARY_IOMMU=y
CONFIG_CALGARY_IOMMU_ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT=y
CONFIG_IOMMU_HELPER=y
CONFIG_AGP=y
CONFIG_AGP_AMD64=y
CONFIG_AGP_INTEL=m
CONFIG_AGP_SIS=m
CONFIG_AGP_VIA=m
Should be fine. SWIOTLB is there for a backup, most (?) Intel machines
don't have IOMMU (even the newest desktop boards).

Are these the correct boot options, without swiotlb?

iommu=noagp,noaperture,off

Or just:

iommu=off
Do you have problems without "iommu=XXX"?

Initially when the PC was installed (and had no IOMMU) options, that
cause the whole harddisk to corrupt and I had to reinstall everything.
It might have been a little older kernel (2.6.23?), but I don't recall
it exactly.

According to messages in syslog I tried to track down similar incidents
and found the iommu articles. But the information was like trial and
error.

Would you suggest that "immu=off" would be best option?

No, you can't use iommu=off. If you have memory located over 4GB and devices which can only do 32-bit DMA then you need some kind of IOMMU support, otherwise things will just blow up.

If you use no options and it's enabled in the kernel config it should be using the GART IOMMU built into the CPU on this machine..
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