Re: crypto: marvell/CESA: Issues with non cache-line aligned buffers

[Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@arm.linux.org.uk>]

On Fri, Jul 03, 2015 at 11:43:05AM +0200, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> Which led us to think that this could be related to a non cache-line
> aligned buffer problem: if we share the cache line with someone
> modifying its data during the DMA transfer, we could experience data
> loss when the cpu decide to flush the data from this cache line to the
> memory.

There's really only two options when you have an overlapping cache line
and the cache line contains CPU-dirty data, but the memory contains
DMA-dirty data.  One of those dirty data has to win out, and the other
has to be destroyed.  (Either you invalidate the CPU cache line, loosing
the CPU-dirty data, or you write-back the cache line, overwriting the DMA-
dirty data.)

What that means is that it's a _bug_ to end up in this situation, nothing
more, nothing less.  There's nothing that arch code can do about it, it's
a DMA-API user bug.

What you'll find is that this is well documented.  See
Documentation/DMA-API.txt, part Id (Streaming DMA mappings):

  Warnings:  Memory coherency operates at a granularity called the cache
  line width.  In order for memory mapped by this API to operate
  correctly, the mapped region must begin exactly on a cache line
  boundary and end exactly on one (to prevent two separately mapped
  regions from sharing a single cache line).  Since the cache line size
  may not be known at compile time, the API will not enforce this
  requirement.  Therefore, it is recommended that driver writers who
  don't take special care to determine the cache line size at run time
  only map virtual regions that begin and end on page boundaries (which
  are guaranteed also to be cache line boundaries).

The behaviour you're seeing here is not ARM specific - any CPU which
uses cache lines and doesn't have hardware coherency will suffer from
this problem.

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