Re: [PATCH] genirq/msi: Make sure PCI MSIs are activated early

From: Thomas Gleixner
Date: Thu Jul 28 2016 - 11:05:57 EST


On Tue, 26 Jul 2016, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jul 2016, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > On Tue, 26 Jul 2016, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > > On Mon, 25 Jul 2016, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 09:45:13AM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > > > I thought the original issue [1] was that PCI_MSI_FLAGS_ENABLE was being
> > > > written before PCI_MSI_ADDRESS_LO. That doesn't sound like a good
> > > > idea to me.
> > >
> > > Well. That's only a problem if the PCI device does not support masking. But
> > > yes, we missed that case back then.
> > >
> > > > That does seem like a problem. Maybe it would be better to delay
> > > > setting PCI_MSI_FLAGS_ENABLE until after the MSI address & data bits
> > > > have been set?
> > >
> > > I thought about that, but that gets ugly pretty fast. Here is an alternative
> > > solution.
> > >
> > > I think that's the proper place to do it _AFTER_ the hierarchical allocation
> > > took place. On x86 Marc's ACTIVATE_EARLY flag would not work because the
> > > message is not yet ready to be assembled.
> >
> > Actually it works, because the MSI domain is the last one which is running the
> > allocation function. So everything else is initialized already.
> >
> > I'll take Marc's patch with some additional commentry as it turned out to be a
> > workaround for the reported VMware issues with PCI/MSI-X pass through.
>
> Now I digged a little bit deeper into all that PCI/MSI maze.
>
> When a interrupt is freed, then we write the msi message to 0, but the
> PCI_MSI_FLAGS_ENABLE flag is still set. That makes me wonder ...

Bjorn, any opinion on that?

Thanks,

tglx