Re: [PATCH rc v2 0/5] iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Fix device crash on kdump kernel

[Robin Murphy]

On 15/04/2026 10:17 pm, Nicolin Chen wrote:
> When transitioning to a kdump kernel, the primary kernel might have crashed
> while endpoint devices were actively bus-mastering DMA. Currently, the SMMU
> driver aggressively resets the hardware during probe by clearing CR0_SMMUEN
> and setting the Global Bypass Attribute (GBPA) to ABORT.
>
> In a kdump scenario, this aggressive reset is highly destructive:
> a) If GBPA is set to ABORT, in-flight DMA will be aborted, generating fatal
>     PCIe AER or SErrors that may panic the kdump kernel
> b) If GBPA is set to BYPASS, in-flight DMA targeting some IOVAs will bypass
>     the SMMU and corrupt the physical memory at those 1:1 mapped IOVAs.

But wasn't that rather the point? Th kdump kernel doesn't know the scope 
of how much could have gone wrong (including potentially the SMMU 
configuration itself), so it just blocks everything, resets and 
reenables the devices it cares about, and ignores whatever else might be 
on fire.

If AER can panic a kdump kernel, that seems like a failing of the kdump 
kernel itself more than anything else (especially given the likelihood 
that additional AER events could follow from whatever initial 
crash/failure triggered kdump to begin with). And frankly if some device 
getting a translation fault could directly SError the whole system, then 
I'd say that system is pretty doomed in general, kdump or not.

Thanks,
Robin.

> To safely absorb in-flight DMA, the kdump kernel must leave SMMUEN=1 intact
> and avoid modifying STRTAB_BASE. This allows HW to continue translating in-
> flight DMA using the crashed kernel's page tables until the endpoint device
> drivers probe and quiesce their respective hardware.
>
> However, the ARM SMMUv3 architecture specification states that updating the
> SMMU_STRTAB_BASE register while SMMUEN == 1 is UNPREDICTABLE or ignored.
>
> This leaves a kdump kernel no choice but to adopt the stream table from the
> crashed kernel.
>
> In this series:
>   - Introduce an ARM_SMMU_OPT_KDUMP
>   - Skip SMMUEN and STRTAB_BASE resets in arm_smmu_device_reset()
>   - Map the crashed kernel's stream tables into the kdump kernel [*]
>   - Defer any default domain attachment to retain STEs until device drivers
>     explicitly request it.
>
> [*] This is implemented via memremap, which only works on a coherent SMMU.
>
> Note that the entire series requires Jason's work that was merged in v6.12:
> 85196f54743d ("iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Reorganize struct arm_smmu_strtab_cfg").
> I have a backported version that is verified with a v6.8 kernel. I can send
> if we see a strong need after this version is accepted.
>
> This is on Github:
> https://github.com/nicolinc/iommufd/commits/smmuv3_kdump-v2
>
> Changelog
> v2
>   * Add warning in non-coherent SMMU cases
>   * Keep eventq/priq disabled v.s. enabling-and-disabling-later
>   * Check KDUMP option in the beginning of arm_smmu_device_reset()
>   * Validate STRTAB format matches HW capability instead of forcing flags
> v1:
>   https://lore.kernel.org/all/cover.1775763475.git.nicolinc@xxxxxxxxxx/
>
> Nicolin Chen (5):
>    iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Add arm_smmu_adopt_strtab() for kdump
>    iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Implement is_attach_deferred() for kdump
>    iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Retain CR0_SMMUEN during kdump device reset
>    iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Skip EVTQ/PRIQ setup in kdump kernel
>    iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Detect ARM_SMMU_OPT_KDUMP in
>      arm_smmu_device_hw_probe()
>
>   drivers/iommu/arm/arm-smmu-v3/arm-smmu-v3.h |   1 +
>   drivers/iommu/arm/arm-smmu-v3/arm-smmu-v3.c | 225 ++++++++++++++++++--
>   2 files changed, 207 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)