Re: PowerPC PCI DMA issues (prefetch/coherency?)

From: Scott Wood
Date: Tue Jun 16 2009 - 12:46:56 EST


Chris Pringle wrote:
The kernel version is 2.6.26. Firmware is custom on a custom board.
Cache coherency on PCI DMA requires that the memory be mapped with the M
attribute on this chip, but that should be happening based on detection of
the core.
I'm not sure where to look to verify this?

Check asm/cputable.h for CPU_FTR_NEED_COHERENT. Make sure that CONFIG_8260 is one of the #ifdefs that turns that on. It looks like that was in place by 2.6.26 in arch/powerpc. I'm not sure what to look for in arch/ppc.

Also make sure that you park the bus on PCI and raise its arbitration
priority, as done at the end of fixup_pci in arch/powerpc/boot/cuboot-pq2.c.
Since this is a reasonably recent kernel,

Not really, there was a fair amount of 82xx work in the mid-2.6.20s. The addition of CPU_FTR_NEED_COHERENT to 82xx was somewhere in that time.

Can you try 2.6.30?

I'd guess that both of these things are correct. I've had a quick look in that file and there is code in there raising arbitartion priority and parking the bus.

Just because the code is there doesn't mean you're using it -- are you using cuImage? Are you using arch/ppc or arch/powerpc?

Typically this would be done by firmware; it's only in cuboot because u-boot wasn't doing it.

BTW, you may want to post to linuxppc-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx for
powerpc-specific issues, especially this kind of hardware issue.

I've just posted there :-)

Doh, sorry. :-)

Interestingly, I've just turned off cache snooping and the problem has got much worse. This has surprised me as I thought that part of the job done by pci_map_sg was to flush the CPU cache

It only flushes the cache on hardware that doesn't do coherent DMA.

-Scott

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