RE: [PATCH 2/2] Revert "USBNET: ax88179_178a: enable tso if usb host supports sg dma"

[Alan Stern]

On Fri, 7 Mar 2014, David Laight wrote:

> From: Alan Stern 
> > On Fri, 7 Mar 2014, David Laight wrote:
> > 
> > > From: Mathias Nyman
> > > > This reverts commit 3804fad45411b48233b48003e33a78f290d227c8.
> > > >
> > > > This commit, together with commit 247bf557273dd775505fb9240d2d152f4f20d304
> > > > "xhci 1.0: Limit arbitrarily-aligned scatter gather." were
> > > > origially added to get xHCI 1.0 hosts and usb ethernet ax88179_178a devices
> > > > working together with scatter gather. xHCI 1.0 hosts pose some requirement on how transfer
> > > > buffers are aligned, setting this requirement for 1.0 hosts caused USB 3.0 mass
> > > > storage devices to fail more frequently.
> > >
> > > This patch doesn't need to be reverted.
> > 
> > Yes, it does.
> > 
> > > Provided the xhci driver doesn't set the flag to say that arbitrary scatter
> > > gather is supported (ie usb_device_no_sg_constraint(dev->udev)) is false)
> > > the ax88179_178a driver won't request transmits that need fragmenting.
> > 
> > True.  But xhci-hcd _will_ set the flag, because of patch 1 in this
> > series.  In other words, patch 1 makes patch 2 necessary.
> 
> I was reading patch 2 first.
> It would seem to be better to modify patch 1 - so it doesn't set the flag.
> Then the changes are limited to the usb tree, and the change to net wouldn't
> need to be reapplied in order to test scatter-gather when it is properly fixed.

> The point is that the no_sg_constraint was added in order to allow
> the ax88179_178a driver to send arbitrarily aligned transfers.
> Nothing else looks at it (well didn't when I scanned the tree a while back).
>
> In effect all the other transfer requests were assumed to be suitably
> aligned.   
>
> The check that caused things to fail was the one added to xhci relatively
> recently that verified the alignment of the fragments.

(Actually the check was added to usbcore, not to xhci-hcd.)

The _real_ problem here seems to be that "no_sg_constraint" is
ambiguous.  Originally it was meant to refer to the constraint that all
SG elements except the last must be a multiple of the maxpacket size.  
For that purpose, the check added to usbcore was entirely appropriate,
as was setting the flag in xhci-hcd.

But now it turns out that the ax88179 driver is violating a _different_
constraint: that Link TRBs must occur only at 1-KB boundaries.  The 
"no_sg_constraint" flag was never meant to describe this.  In other 
words, the flag issue is separate from the problem facing ax88179.

The appropriate way to address this new problem for the future is to
remove the second constraint by adding correct support for TD
fragments into xhci-hcd.  The appropriate way to address the problem
right now in the -stable kernels is to prevent ax88179 from using SG -- 
and not by abusing the "no_sg_constraint" flag, which is not directly 
related to the TD fragment problem.

Alan Stern

--
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/