Re: [PATCH V5 2/3] ARM64 LPC: Add missing range exception for special ISA

Mark Rutland
2016-11-08T17:10:04Z

On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 05:19:54PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tuesday, November 8, 2016 11:49:53 AM CET Mark Rutland wrote:
> > My understanding of ISA (which may be flawed) is that it's not part of
> > the PCI host bridge, but rather on x86 it happens to share the IO space
> > with PCI.
>
> On normal systems, ISA or LPC are behind a PCI bridge device, which
> passes down both low addresses of I/O space and memory space.

Ok, so the use of those address spaces is an artifact of the ISA
controller being a device under the PCI host bridge.

Given we can have multiple domains, surely that implies we can have
multiple ISA controllers in general?

> > I believe that we could theoretically have multiple independent LPC/ISA
> > busses, as is possible with PCI on !x86 systems. If the current ISA code
> > assumes a singleton bus, I think that's something that needs to be fixed
> > up more generically.
> >
> > I don't see why we should need any architecture-specific code here. Why
> > can we not fix up the ISA bus code in drivers/of/address.c such that it
> > handles multiple ISA bus instances, and translates all sub-device
> > addresses relative to the specific bus instance?
>
> I think it is a relatively safe assumption that there is only one
> ISA bridge. A lot of old drivers hardcode PIO or memory addresses
> when talking to an ISA device, so having multiple instances is
> already problematic.

I'm worried that this might not be a safe assumption. Hardware these
days has a habit of pushing the boundaries of our expectations.

If we're going to assume that, I'd certainly want the kernel to verify
that it's true for all instanciated ISA/LPC devices. Otherwise, I can
imagine people relying on (or working around) that assumption in ACPI
tables and DTs, and that will be a nightmare (at best) to untangle in
future.

Thanks,
Mark.
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