Re: [Report] annoyed dma debug warning "cacheline tracking EEXIST, overlapping mappings aren't supported"

[Ming Lei <ming.lei@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2024 at 09:41:51AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2024 at 09:23:14AM +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> >> 3) some storage utilities
> >> - dm thin provisioning utility of thin_check
> >> - `dt`(https://github.com/RobinTMiller/dt)
> >>
> >> I looks like same user buffer is used in more than 1 dio.
> >>
> >> 4) some self cooked test code which does same thing with 1)
> >>
> >> In storage stack, the buffer provider is far away from the actual DMA
> >> controller operating code, which doesn't have the knowledge if
> >> DMA_ATTR_SKIP_CPU_SYNC should be set.
> >>
> >> And suggestions for avoiding this noise?
> >>
> > Can you check if this is the NULL page? Operations like 'discard' will 
> > create bios with several bvecs all pointing to the same NULL page.
> > That would be the most obvious culprit.
> 
> The only case I fully understand without looking into the details
> is raid1, and that will obviously map the same data multiple times
> because it writes it out multiple time.  Now mapping a buffer
> multiple times for a DMA_TO_DEVICE is relatively harmless in
> practice as the data is transferred to the device, but it it
> still breaks the dma buffer ownership model in the dma which is
> really helpful to find bugs where people don't think about this
> at all.  Not sure if there is any good solution here.
>

Another related topic:

Recently direct IO buffer alignment changes to just respect DMA
controller alignment which is often too relax, such as dma_alignment
is just 3 for many host controllers, then two direct IO buffers may
cross same DMA mapping cache line.

Is this one real problem?


Thanks,
Ming