Re: [BUG] XHCI getting ZONE_DMA32 memory > than its bus_dma_limit

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Fri Jul 03 2020 - 13:42:32 EST


On 2020-07-03 15:53, Nicolas Saenz Julienne wrote:
Hi Jeremy,
thanks for the bug report.

Just for the record the offending commit is: c84dc6e68a1d2 ("dma-pool: add
additional coherent pools to map to gfp mask").

On Thu, 2020-07-02 at 12:49 -0500, Jeremy Linton wrote:
Hi,

Using 5.8rc3:

The rpi4 has a 3G dev->bus_dma_limit on its XHCI controller. With a usb3
hub, plus a few devices plugged in, randomly devices will fail
operations. This appears to because xhci_alloc_container_ctx() is
getting buffers > 3G via dma_pool_zalloc().

Tracking that down, it seems to be caused by dma_alloc_from_pool() using
dev_to_pool()->dma_direct_optimal_gfp_mask() to "optimistically" select
the atomic_pool_dma32 but then failing to verify that the allocations in
the pool are less than the dev bus_dma_limit.

I can reproduce this too.

The way I see it, dev_to_pool() wants a strict dma_direct_optimal_gfp_mask()
that is never wrong, since it's going to stick to that pool for the device's
lifetime. I've been looking at how to implement it, and it's not so trivial as
I can't see a failproof way to make a distinction between who needs DMA32 and
who is OK with plain KERNEL memory.

Otherwise, as Jeremy points out, the patch needs to implement allocations with
an algorithm similar to __dma_direct_alloc_pages()'s, which TBH I don't know if
it's a little overkill for the atomic context.

Short of finding a fix in the coming rc's, I suggest we revert this.

Or perhaps just get rid of atomic_pool_dma32 (and allocate atomic_pool_dma from ZONE_DMA32 if !ZONE_DMA). That should make it fall pretty much back in line while still preserving the potential benefit of the kernel pool for non-address-constrained devices.

Robin.