Re: [PATCH v3 6/7] riscv: add a data fence for CMODX in the kernel mode

Andrea Parri
2025-03-14T15:23:32Z

> I found that Apple's aic irqchip uses writel_relaxed for sending IPIs.
> I am not sure if it is a practice using relaxed mmio in the driver to
> deal with IPIs. I am more convinced that driver should use the relaxed
> version if there is no data/io dependency for the driver itself. But
> it is true that a fence in the driver makes programming easier.

I emphatize with this viewpoint.

Perhaps a first counterargument/remark is that lifting those fences (e.g.,
irq-gic-v3) out of the various drivers into core/more generic code would
mean having some generic primitives to "order" the stores vs send_ipis;
however, we (kernel developers) don't have such an API today. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, considered that (as already recalled in this thread) even
on a same architecture send_ipis can mean things/operations as different
as "do an MMIO write", "write a system register", "execute an environment
call instruction" and what more; as a consequence, such matters tend to
become quite tricky even within a given/single driver (e.g., 80e4e1f472889
("irqchip/gic-v3: Use dsb(ishst) to order writes with ICC_SGI1R_EL1
accesses"), more so at "Linux level".

> As far as OpenSBI is concerned, there is a wmb(), which translated to
> fence ow, ow, in the generic code path. Regardless, there may be more
> than one flavor of SBIs, should we also consider that?

For the sake of argument, how would you proceed to do that?

Let me put it this way. If the answer to your question is "no, we should
not", then you have just showed that the fence w, o added by the patch is
redundant if riscv_use_sbi_for_rfence(). If the answer is "yes", then I
think the patch could use some words to describe why the newly added fence
suffices to order the explicit writes before the ecall at stake _for each_
of the relevant implementations. IIRC, the ISA wordings for ecall (and
fences) do not appear to provide much help to that end. Hence, to iterate,
I really don't see other ways other than digging into the implementations
and asking the developers or the experts of interest to achieve that.
After all, what I'm saying seems to align with what you've done for (some
version of) OpenSBI.

Andrea

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/6432e7e97b828d887da8794c150161c4@kernel.org/T/#mc90f2a2eb423ce1ba579fc4f566ad49a16825041