Re: [PATCH 2/3] PCI: Handle device quirks when accessing sysfs resource entries

Bjorn Helgaas
2013-04-08T17:29:17Z

On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 2:49 AM, James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-04-04 at 12:06 -0600, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 6:51 PM, Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com> wrote:

>> > -Reconsider whether supporting read/write on the resource files for IO port
>> > regions like these makes any sense. Obviously mmap isn't very practical for
>> > IO port access on x86 but you could even do something like an ioctl for this
>> > purpose. Not very many pieces of software would need to access these files
>> > so it's likely OK if the API is a bit ugly. That would prevent something
>> > like grepping through sysfs from generating port accesses to random devices.
>>
>> This is the approach I'd like to push on for a kernel fix.
>
> Me too. I think the quirks approach is unsupportable. Worst case I
> think we should have an ability for the *driver* to mark the region as
> having strange access rules.
>
>> I'm not a
>> VM person, but if it were possible to support .mmap() in such a way
>> that a handler would be called for every access to the region, we
>> could easily support I/O port access that way.
>
> We could ... the OS could trigger a page fault on every access using the
> COW mechanism ... however, that mechanism wasn't intended for write
> combining, so although it's theoretically possible to add it, I'd be a
> bit wary.

The current problem case is only I/O port accesses, so we only have to
support 1/2/4-byte accesses, and I don't think write combining is an
issue. But it still sounds like COW might be trying to force a square
peg into a round hole. Maybe there are other approaches. I just
thought of .mmap() because that's already used for MEM space accesses.

Bjorn