Re: [RFC PATCH 3/7] arm64: mm: use nGnRnE instead of nGnRE on Apple processors

[Mohamed Mediouni]

> On 21 Jan 2021, at 19:15, Marc Zyngier <maz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On 2021-01-21 17:55, Will Deacon wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 04:25:54PM +0000, Marc Zyngier wrote:
>>> On 2021-01-21 15:12, Mohamed Mediouni wrote:
>>>> Please ignore that patch.
>>>> 
>>>> It turns out that the PCIe controller on Apple M1 expects posted
>>>> writes and so the memory range for it ought to be set nGnRE.
>>>> So, we need to use nGnRnE for on-chip MMIO and nGnRE for PCIe BARs.
>>>> 
>>>> The MAIR approach isn’t adequate for such a thing, so we’ll have to
>>>> look elsewhere.
>>> Well, there isn't many alternative to having a memory type defined
>>> in MAIR if you want to access your PCIe devices with specific
>>> semantics.
>>> It probably means defining a memory type for PCI only, but:
>>> - we only have a single free MT entry, and I'm not sure we can
>>> afford to waste this on a specific platform (can we re-purpose
>>> GRE instead?),
>> We already have an nGnRnE MAIR for config space accesses.
> 
> I'm confused. If M1 needs nGnRE for PCI, and overrides nGnRE to nE
> for its in-SoC accesses, where does nGnRE goes?
> 
> Or do you propose that it is the page tables that get a different
> MT index?
> 

That MAIR patch that I added overrides nGnRE accesses to nGnRnE.

Linux tries to access to those SoC devices using nGnRE as the device
memory type without that workaround.

Maybe have a device tree property to override the used device memory type
for a given device on the SoC? Or that’s too big for what’s at the end just one 
particular set of SoCs?

But what the hardware wants is accesses to in-SoC devices being nGnRnE
and access to the PCIe BARs being nGnRE.

So both have to be supported…

>       M.
> -- 
> Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny...