RE: [PATCH] ASoC: Intel: sst: ipc command timeout

[Lu, Brent]

> 
> I have mixed feelings about this.
> 
> One one hand, this looks simple enough.
> 
> But on the other hand we have other users of memcpy_fromio(), including
> SOF drivers, so what are the odds we have the same problems in other
> places? Wouldn't it be safer to either change this function so that it's
> behavior is not ambiguous or compiler-dependent, or fix the compiler?
> 

Hi Pierre and Amadeusz,

I have to admit that I didn't dig into clang's __builtin_memcpy to see what's
happening inside so I don't have direct evidence to say it's clang's problem.
What I know is kernel built by clang10 works fine but have this issue once
changed to clang11. At first I also suspect that it's a timing issue so I checked
the command transaction. The transaction is simple, host writes command
in SST_IPCX register, the DSP then writes reply in SST_IPCD register and
trigger an interrupt. Finally the irq thread sst_byt_irq_thread() reads the
SST_IPCD register to complete the transaction. I added some debug messages
to see if there is something wrong in the transaction but it all looks good. 

I am also confused that why this only happens to BYT but not BDW since they
share the same register accessing code in sst-dsp.c. I checked the code and
realized that in BDW, the irq thread (hsw_irq_thread) performs 32-bit register
read instead of 64-bit in BYT platform. Therefore I change the code in BYT to
use two readl() calls and found the problem is gone. My best guess is it's
related to the implementation of __builtin_memcpy() but not sure it's the
timing or implementing cause this problem.


Regards,
Brent