Re: Device address specific mapping of arm,mmu-500

From: Ray Jui
Date: Wed May 31 2017 - 02:14:03 EST


Hi Marc/Robin/Will,

I did a little more digging myself and I think I now understand what you meant by identity mapping, i.e., configuring the MMU-500 with 1:1 mapping between the DMA address and the IOVA address.

I think that should work. In the end, due to this MSI write parsing issue in our PCIe controller, the reason to use IOMMU is to allow the cache attributes (AxCACHE) of the MSI writes towards GICv3 ITS to be modified by the IOMMU to be device type, while leaving the rest of inbound reads/writes from/to DDR with more optimized cache attributes setting, to allow I/O coherency to be still enabled for the PCIe controller. In fact, the PCIe controller itself is fully capable of DMA to/from the full address space of our SoC including both DDR and any device memory.

The 1:1 mapping will still pose some translation overhead like you suggested; however, the overhead of allocating page tables and locking will be gone. This sounds like the best possible option I have currently.

May I ask, how do I start to try to get this identity mapping to work as an experiment and proof of concept? Any pointer or advise is highly appreciated as you can see I'm not very experienced with this. I found Will recently added the IOMMU_DOMAIN_IDENTITY support to the arm-smmu driver. But I suppose that is to bypass the SMMU completely, instead of still going through the MMU with 1:1 translation. Is my understanding correct?

Thanks,

Ray

On 5/30/2017 3:06 PM, Ray Jui wrote:
Hi Marc/Robin/Will,

On 5/30/17 10:27 AM, Marc Zyngier wrote:
On 30/05/17 18:16, Ray Jui wrote:
Hi Marc,

On 5/30/17 9:59 AM, Marc Zyngier wrote:
On 30/05/17 17:49, Ray Jui wrote:
Hi Will,

On 5/30/17 8:14 AM, Will Deacon wrote:
On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 06:18:45PM -0700, Ray Jui wrote:
I'm writing to check with you to see if the latest arm-smmu.c driver in
v4.12-rc Linux for smmu-500 can support mapping that is only specific to
a particular physical address range while leave the rest still to be
handled by the client device. I believe this can already be supported by
the device tree binding of the generic IOMMU framework; however, it is
not clear to me whether or not the arm-smmu.c driver can support it.

To give you some background information:

We have a SoC that has PCIe root complex that has a build-in logic block
to forward MSI writes to ARM GICv3 ITS. Unfortunately, this logic block
has a HW bug that causes the MSI writes not parsed properly and can
potentially corrupt data in the internal FIFO. A workaround is to have
ARM MMU-500 takes care of all inbound transactions. I found that is
working after hooking up our PCIe root complex to MMU-500; however, even
with this optimized arm-smmu driver in v4.12, I'm still seeing a
significant Ethernet throughput drop in both the TX and RX directions.
The throughput drop is very significant at around 50% (but is already
much improved compared to other prior kernel versions at 70~90%).
Did Robin's experiments help at all with this?

http://www.linux-arm.org/git?p=linux-rm.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/iommu/perf

It looks like these are new optimizations that have not yet been merged
in v4.12? I'm going to give it a try.

One alternative is to only use MMU-500 for MSI writes towards
GITS_TRANSLATER register in the GICv3, i.e., if I can define a specific
region of physical address that I want MMU-500 to act on and leave the
rest of inbound transactions to be handled directly by our PCIe
controller, it can potentially work around the HW bug we have and at the
same time achieve optimal throughput.
I don't think you can bypass the SMMU for MSIs unless you give them their
own StreamIDs, which is likely to break things horribly in the kernel. You
could try to create an identity mapping, but you'll still have the
translation overhead and you'd probably end up having to supply your own DMA
ops to manage the address space. I'm assuming that you need to prevent the
physical address of the ITS from being allocated as an IOVA?
Will, is that a HW limitation that the SMMU cannot be used, only for MSI
writes, in which case, the physical address range is very specific in
our ASIC that falls in the device memory region (e.g., below 0x80000000)?

In fact, what I need in this case is a static mapping from IOMMU on the
physical address of the GITS_TRANSLATER of the GICv3 ITS, which is the
address that MSI writes go to. This is to bypass the MSI forwarding
logic in our PCIe controller. At the same time, I can leave the rest of
inbound transactions to be handled by our PCIe controller without going
through the MMU.
How is that going to work for DMA? I imagine your network interfaces do
have to access memory, don't they? How can the transactions be
terminated in the PCIe controller?
Sorry, I may not phrase this properly. These inbound transactions (DMA
write to DDR, from endpoint) do not terminate in the PCIe controller.
They are taken by the PCIe controller as PCIe transactions and will be
carried towards the designated memory on the host.
So what is the StreamID used for these transactions? Is that a different
StreamID from that of the DMAing device? If you want to avoid the SMMU
effect on the transaction, you must make sure if doesn't match anything
there.

Thanks,

M.

Thanks for the reply. I'm checking with our ASIC team, but from my
understanding, the stream ID in our ASIC is constructed based on the
some custom fields that a developer can program + some standard PCIe BDF
fields. That is, I don't think we can make the stream ID from the same
PF different between MSI writes and DMA writes, as you have already
predicted.

It sounds like I do not have much option here...

Thanks,

Ray