Re: [Fwd: Re: [PATCH 0/5]PCI: x86 MMCONFIG]

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Sat Dec 22 2007 - 11:42:42 EST


Loic Prylli wrote:
On 12/20/2007 6:21 PM, Tony Camuso wrote:
And the MMCONFIG problem with enterprise systems and workstations, where
we do control the BIOS (for the most part), is due to known bugs in
certain versions of certain chipsets, HT1000, AMD8132, among them, not
the BIOS.



The lack of MMCONFIG support is indeed because some hypertransport
chipsets lack that support. But there are some BIOSes out there that are
advertising support for all busses in their MCFG acpi attribute (even
the busses managed by some amd8131 in a mixed nvidia-ck804/amd8131
motherboard), and the BIOS seems at least faulty for advertising a
capability that does not exist.

This didn't really occur to me before for some reason. But yes, the MCFG table lists the buses to which each MMCONFIG region is applicable. If there are entire buses which MMCONFIG cannot access, it should not be indicating they are accessible via MMCONFIG in the ACPI MCFG table. If it is, then it's truly a BIOS bug.

Unless of course Linux isn't handling what the MCFG table is indicating properly. Then it's our bug. It would be good to verify this on one of the systems involved..

One of the things this patch (currently in -mm) does is dump out the segment and starting/ending buses for each MCFG configuration listed. The dmesg from this patch applied on such a system would tell you which is the case:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/x86/linux-2.6-x86.git;a=commit;h=e18c985289ee356f06dbc953281a3c140a02fbb3

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from hancockr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/