Re: [RFC PATCH 2/2] PCI: exynos: Add PCIe support for Samsung GH7 SoC

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wednesday 23 April 2014 15:23:16 Liviu Dudau wrote:
> > Unfortunately we are in a tricky situation on arm64 because we have
> > to support both server-type SoCs and embedded-type SoCs. In an
> > embedded system, you can't trust the boot loader to do a proper
> > setup of all the hardware, so the kernel needs full control over
> > all the initialization. In a server, the initialization is the
> > responsibility of the firmware, and we don't want the kernel to
> > even know about those registers.
> > 
> > My hope is that all server chips use an SBSA compliant PCIe
> > implementation, but we already have X-Gene, which is doing server
> > workloads with a nonstandard PCIe, and it's possible that there
> > will also be server-like systems with a DesignWare PCIe block
> > instead of an SBSA compliant one. We can still support those, but
> > I don't want to see more than one implementation of dw-pcie
> > on servers. Just like we have the generic PCIe support that Will
> > is doing for virtual machines and SBSA compliant systems, we
> > would do one dw-pcie variant for all systems that come with a
> > host firmware and rely on it being set up already.
> 
> There is nothing in the SBSA that mandates firmware setup. All it requires
> is that hardware is setup in a way that is not specific to a board
> or a particular OEM. Surely if the setup being done for GH7 is always
> the same it should fit the bill?

GH7 is already not SBSA compliant because it uses a nonstandard config
space access method, and it uses its own MSI controller rather than GIC.
This means it violates at least two out of the four clauses in SBSA
describing PCIe.

Regardless of this, the level of detail describing config space and
MSI handling in SBSA can only make sense if the purpose is to handle
all compliant implementations without platform specific code. If you
require platform specific setup code in the OS, this underlying assumption
no longer holds true and there is no point in having a spec in the
first place.

I think we should treat DW-PCIe in the same way if anyone attempts
to use that in a server, e.g. in SBSA level 0. As you can see here,
even when reusing hardware between Exynos and GH7, you can't just
use the same init code, so it has to be in firmware to be any good.
On a real server platform, you can't require a kernel upgrade every
time a new SoC comes out, any basic functionality like PCI just has to
work with existing OS images.

	Arnd
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