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

From: Chris Pringle
Date: Thu Jun 18 2009 - 07:24:56 EST


Chris Pringle wrote:
Chris Pringle wrote:
You could enable CONFIG_NOT_COHERENT_CACHE.

I've just tried this (I had to edit Kconfig in power/platforms to make the build system accept it), and interestingly it's making no difference. I'm using streaming mappings, and are using the pci_map_sg functions to ensure the memory is mapped/flushed correctly. I've also explicitly put in a pci_dma_sync_sg_for_device, however that's also not made any difference. Turning the cpu cache snoop off has the same affect as it did without CONFIG_NOT_COHERENT_CACHE; it gets much worse. Any other ideas?

Will back off the low latency patches next, and give 2.6.30 a try - see if that makes any difference.

Low latency patches made no difference. Tried it with 2.6.30 and it now works. There are a couple of commits contributing to the fix, including one introduced between 2.6.29-rc8 and 2.6.29 proper in powerpc/kernel/head_32.S (couple of commits with the name "Fix Respect _PAGE_COHERENT on classic ppc32 SW TLB load machines"). I've tried backporting this to 2.6.29-rc8 and it then worked. Backporting to 2.6.26 made no difference however, so I suspect there are other things fixed which are also contributing.

I'm going to move to 2.6.29/2.6.30 which should resolve our issue.

Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread.

The other part of the fix is in asm-powerpc/pgtable32.h. _PAGE_BASE needs _PAGE_COHERENT in order to work correctly, and in fact there is now a comment in there to that affect in 2.6.29. Backporting that change has made it work on 2.6.26. Both this patch, and the fix to head_32.S are needed for it to work correctly on older kernels.

Chris

--

______________________________
Chris Pringle
Software Engineer

Miranda Technologies Ltd.
Hithercroft Road
Wallingford
Oxfordshire OX10 9DG
UK

Tel. +44 1491 820206
Fax. +44 1491 820001
www.miranda.com

____________________________

Miranda Technologies Limited
Registered in England and Wales CN 02017053
Registered Office: James House, Mere Park, Dedmere Road, Marlow, Bucks, SL7 1FJ
--
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/