RE: [PATCH v2] PCI: Add ATS-disable quirk for AMD Stoney GPUs

[Deucher, Alexander]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joerg Roedel [mailto:jroedel@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2017 7:50 AM
> To: Bjorn Helgaas
> Cc: Bjorn Helgaas; linux-pci@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;
> Daniel Drake; Deucher, Alexander; Samuel Sieb; David Woodhouse
> Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] PCI: Add ATS-disable quirk for AMD Stoney GPUs
> 
> Hi Bjorn,
> 
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 11:53:58AM -0500, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> > I'm still confused.  Per Samuel
> > (6dd9dbac-9b65-bc7c-bb08-413a05d09fc8@xxxxxxxx):
> >
> > Samuel> The other patch seems to fix this issue without disabling ATS.
> > Samuel> Isn't that better?
> >
> > and Alex
> >
> (BN6PR12MB1652DF4130FC792B71DD9974F7C00@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 2.prod.outlook.com):
> >
> > Alex> I talked to our validation team and ATS was validated on Stoney,
> > Alex> so this patch is just working around something else.  The other
> > Alex> patch fixes it and is a valid optimization ...
> >
> > I'm confused about what this "other patch" is and whether we want that
> > one, this one, or both.

Here's the other patch:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2017-May/009421.html

> 
> The other patches floating around lowered the ATS flush-rate from the
> AMD IOMMU driver, which makes the issue disappear as well. But the issue
> only disappeared, it is not solved and could probably still be
> reproduced with a GPU usage pattern that increases the ATS flush-rate.
> 
> So blacklisting the device for ATS is still the safest thing we could do
> here.

I don't have any objection per se, but I'd hate to add a quirk to disable it only to remove it again in the future if we needed ATS related functionality later.  We are in the process of upstreaming KFD support for Carrizo (which is a bigger version of Stoney) and that utilizes ATS related functionality to provide GPU access to pageable memory.  There are no immediate requirements for Stoney, but that may change.

Alex