Re: [PATCH] iommu: Always fill in gather when unmapping

Robin Murphy
2026-04-01T16:33:51Z

On 2026-03-31 8:56 pm, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> The fixed commit assumed that the gather would always be populated if
> an iotlb_sync was required.
>
> arm-smmu-v3, amd, VT-d, riscv, s390, mtk all use information from the
> gather during their iotlb_sync() and this approach works for them.
>
> However, arm-smmu, qcom_iommu, ipmmu-vmsa, sun50i, sprd, virtio,
> apple-dart all ignore the gather during their iotlb_sync(). They
> mostly issue a full flush.
>
> Unfortunately the latter set of drivers often don't bother to add
> anything to the gather since they don't intend on using it. Since the
> core code now blocks gathers that were never filled, this caused those
> drivers to stop getting their iotlb_sync() calls and breaks them.
>
> Since it is impossible to tell the difference between gathers that are
> empty because there is nothing to do and gathers that are empty
> because they are not used, fill in the gathers for the missing cases.
>
> io-pgtable might have intended to allow the driver to choose between
> gather or immediate flush because it passed gather to
> ops->tlb_add_page(), however no driver does anything with it.

Apart from arm-smmu-v3...

> mtk uses io-pgtable-arm-v7s but added the range to the gather in the
> unmap callback. Move this into the io-pgtable-arm unmap itself. That
> will fix all the armv7 using drivers (arm-smmu, qcom_iommu,
> ipmmu-vmsa).

io-pgtable-arm-v7s != io-pgtable-arm. You're *breaking* MTK (and failing
to fix the other v7s user, which is MSM).

> arm-smmu uses both ARM_V7S and ARM LPAE formats. The LPAE formats
> already have the gather population because SMMUv3 requires it, so it
> becomes consistent.

Huh? arm-smmu-v3 invokes iommu_iotlb_gather_add_page() itself, because
arm-smmu-v3 uses gathers; arm-smmu does not. io-pgtable-arm has nothing
to do with it. Invoking add range before add_page will end up defeating
the iommu_iotlb_gather_is_disjoint() check and making SMMUv3
overinvalidate between disjoint ranges.

I guess now I remember why we weren't validating gathers in core code
before :(

However, if it is for the sake of a core code check, why not just make
the core code robust itself?

Thanks,
Robin.

----->8-----
diff --git a/drivers/iommu/iommu.c b/drivers/iommu/iommu.c
index 35db51780954..9ca23f89a279 100644
--- a/drivers/iommu/iommu.c
+++ b/drivers/iommu/iommu.c
@@ -2714,6 +2714,10 @@ static size_t __iommu_unmap(struct iommu_domain *domain,
pr_debug("unmapped: iova 0x%lx size 0x%zx\n",
iova, unmapped_page);

+ /* If the driver itself isn't using the gather, mark it used */
+ if (iotlb_gather->end <= iotlb_gather->start)
+ iommu_iotlb_gather_add_range(&iotlb_gather, iova, unmapped_page);
+
iova += unmapped_page;
unmapped += unmapped_page;
}