Re: Rampant ext3/4 corruption on 2.6.34-rc7 with VIVT ARM (Marvell88f5182)

[James Bottomley]

On Thu, 2010-05-13 at 08:47 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 23:21 +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> > Shilimkar, Santosh wrote:
> > > There was a memory write barrier missing before the DMA descriptors 
> > > are handed over to DMA controller.
> > 
> > On that note, are the cache flush functions implicit memory barriers?

Not exactly ... they *should* be stream ordered with respect to accesses
to the memory they're flushing (which isn't the same thing, and no-one
ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of chip designers, but if a
flush instruction needs explicit ordering, I'd expect that to be built
into the arch layer).

> (Adding Fujita on CC)
> 
> That's a very good question. The generic inline implementation of
> dma_sync_* is:
> 
> static inline void dma_sync_single_for_cpu(struct device *dev, dma_addr_t addr,
> 					   size_t size,
> 					   enum dma_data_direction dir)
> {
> 	struct dma_map_ops *ops = get_dma_ops(dev);
> 
> 	BUG_ON(!valid_dma_direction(dir));
> 	if (ops->sync_single_for_cpu)
> 		ops->sync_single_for_cpu(dev, addr, size, dir);
> 	debug_dma_sync_single_for_cpu(dev, addr, size, dir);
> }
> 
> Which means that for coherent architectures that do not implement
> the ops->sync_* hooks, we are probably missing a barrier here... 
> 
> Thus if the above is expected to be a memory barrier, it's broken on
> cache coherent powerpc for example. On non-coherent powerpc, we do cache
> flushes and those are implicit barriers.

Can you explain this a little more.  On a cache coherent machine, the
sync is a nop ... why would you want a nop to be any type of barrier?

James


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