Re: [RFC PATCH] docs/memory-barriers.txt: Rewrite "KERNEL I/O BARRIER EFFECTS" section

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 2:20 PM Will Deacon <will.deacon@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 02:01:50PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 12:36 PM Will Deacon <will.deacon@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 12:31:50PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > > On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 11:27 AM Thomas Petazzoni
> > One reference to non-posted transaction in a comment is in
> > drivers/net/ethernet/dec/tulip/de4x5.c:
> >
> > /*
> > ** The DE4X5 interrupt handler.
> > **
> > ** I/O Read/Writes through intermediate PCI bridges are never 'posted',
> > ** so that the asserted interrupt always has some real data to work with -
> > ** if these I/O accesses are ever changed to memory accesses, ensure the
> > ** STS write is read immediately to complete the transaction if the adapter
> > ** is not on bus 0. Lost interrupts can still occur when the PCI bus load
> > ** is high and descriptor status bits cannot be set before the associated
> > ** interrupt is asserted and this routine entered.
> > */
>
> Thankfully, that driver is both old and non-portable:
>
>   depends on VIRT_TO_BUS || ALPHA || PPC || SPARC
>
> so I'm not especially concerned about it. Judging by the comment, we'd
> need to add something like:
>
>
> diff --git a/drivers/net/ethernet/dec/tulip/de4x5.c b/drivers/net/ethernet/dec/tulip/de4x5.c
> index 66535d1653f6..c85089f65b0e 100644
> --- a/drivers/net/ethernet/dec/tulip/de4x5.c
> +++ b/drivers/net/ethernet/dec/tulip/de4x5.c
> @@ -1556,6 +1556,10 @@ de4x5_interrupt(int irq, void *dev_id)
>         sts = inl(DE4X5_STS);            /* Read IRQ status */
>         outl(sts, DE4X5_STS);            /* Reset the board interrupts */
>
> +       /* Beware of PCI posted writes */
> +       if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_ARM64) && lp->bus_num)
> +               inl(DE4X5_STS);
> +
>         if (!(sts & lp->irq_mask)) break;/* All done */
>         handled = 1;
>
>
>
> if we wanted to get this working reliably on arm64. However, I'll be honest
> and say we haven't had much demand for supporting DEC PCI devices yet :)

Agreed. I find a total of 590 drivers calling inb/outb and related
helpers, using "git grep -wl 'out\(l\|w\|b\)' drivers/ sound/" (there
are probably a couple more. There are hardly any among those
that one would expect to see in a modern machine:

- The majority is for ISA, PCMCIA or PCI devices, as opposed
  to PCIe, and presumably no longer sold.
- Many are de factor architecture specific, e.g. drivers for
  stuff in a PC chipset.

drivers/staging/comedi/ has some things in it that have
a slight chance of still being put into modern machines
when moving from an old embedded system to a new one,
but being staging, chances are that the drivers also require
other changes before they work on a new architecture.

Overall, I wonder if we'd be better off completely disabling
outb etc on arm64, and only supporting iomap()/ioread()/iowrite()
instead, without giving any guarantees there.
Getting there would definitely require some code changes
(and many Kconfig changes), but it still seems appealing
given how much legacy stuff we could completely ignore
afterwards.

> > I found another comment in the via-rhine driver:
> >
> > /* Beware of PCI posted writes */
> > #define IOSYNC  do { ioread8(ioaddr + StationAddr); } while (0)
> >
> > this one is used in the chip reset function, and in the transmit
> > path.
>
> Since this is doing a read-back, I take this comment as saying "posted
> writes are a thing, so perform a read-back to force the prior write to
> complete", which is fine.

Right.

       Arnd