[PATCH 0/6] ARM: mvebu: mvebu-mbus and I/O coherency fixes

[thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com (Thomas Petazzoni)]

Russell,

On Mon, 12 Jan 2015 12:36:13 +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 08:57:21PM +0100, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> > We will indeed need to do more extensive testing and review. However, I
> > don't agree that this should prevent this patch from going to stable:
> > the current situation in the kernel (and also past kernels) is known to
> > be broken: DMA coherent mappings allocated by dma_alloc_coherent() are
> > *not* coherent in the current situation. Writes made by the device to
> > the memory are not guaranteed to be immediately visible to the CPU,
> > unless an explicit I/O sync barrier is done, which obviously is never
> > done for DMA coherent mappings since those are assumed by Linux to be
> > coherent, and therefore not require any cache maintenance operation.
> 
> That's actually an incorrect statement.
> 
> On all ARMv6+ where DMA coherent memory is "normal memory, non-cached,
> write combine" but because it's "normal memory", memory barriers are
> required.  This is why we have the memory barriers in readl() and
> writel().

Except that a readl() or writel() do *not* imply the I/O
synchronization barrier that is needed on I/O coherent Marvell CPUs to
ensure that the CPU sees the changes made by a DMA master to the
memory. At least in the current kernel code, at least.

One option would maybe have been to add this I/O synchronization
barrier in the memory barrier implementation, but it seems a lot
simpler to rely on the automatic I/O synchronization mechanism instead.

Thanks,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com