Re: [PATCH 15/18] irqchip/apple-aic: Add support for the Apple Interrupt Controller

From: Hector Martin 'marcan'
Date: Mon Feb 08 2021 - 06:30:31 EST


On 08/02/2021 19.29, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 10:25 AM Marc Zyngier <maz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 04 Feb 2021 20:39:48 +0000, Hector Martin <marcan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

+{
+ return readl(ic->base + reg);

Please consider using the _relaxed accessors, as I don't think any of
these interacts with memory (apart from IPIs, of course).

MSI interrupts require serializing with DMA, so at the minimum I think there
needs to be something that ensures that DMA from device into memory
has completed before delivering the completion interrupt to a driver. This
may already be implied when the AIC is entered, but this is hard to know
without actual hardware specs.


I don't think this can be implied in any case, because if IRQ A fires and then the CPU speculates its way through AIC into the IRQ B handler, which reads DMA'd memory, then IRQ B fires and it has higher priority and *that* is what ends up getting returned from the event register first, the execution will commit with an ordering violation.

I'm pretty sure we need *some* level of explicit synchronization between reading the event register and actually delivering IRQs downstream. Using _relaxed might be okay, but we'd still need something where the isb() currently is in aic_handle_irq (though I admit I don't have a perfect picture of the memory ordering subtleties involved here yet).

Incidentally, just from the races and problems I've run into with trivial tests in m1n1, these CPUs seem to be *very* eager to speculate and I suspect they will help uncover race conditions in Linux...

--
Hector Martin "marcan" (marcan@xxxxxxxxx)
Public Key: https://mrcn.st/pub