Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] x86: Add Isolated Memory Regions for Quark X1000

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

On Mon 2015-01-26 14:15:27, Bryan O'Donoghue wrote:
> Intel's Quark X1000 SoC contains a set of registers called Isolated Memory
> Regions. IMRs are accessed over the IOSF mailbox interface. IMRs are areas
> carved out of memory that define read/write access rights to the various
> system agents within the Quark system. For a given agent in the system it is
> possible to specify if that agent may read or write an area of memory
> defined by an IMR with a granularity of 1 KiB.
> 
> Quark_SecureBootPRM_330234_001.pdf section 4.5 details the concept of IMRs
> quark-x1000-datasheet.pdf section 12.7.4 details the implementation of IMRs
> in silicon.
> 
> eSRAM flush, CPU Snoop write-only, CPU SMM Mode, CPU non-SMM mode, RMU and
> PCIe Virtual Channels (VC0 and VC1) can have individual read/write access
> masks applied to them for a given memory region in Quark X1000. This
> enables IMRs to treat each memory transaction type listed above on an
> individual basis and to filter appropriately based on the IMR access mask
> for the memory region. Quark supports eight IMRs.
> 
> Since all of the DMA capable SoC components in the X1000 are mapped to VC0
> it is possible to define sections of memory as invalid for DMA write
> operations originating from Ethernet, USB, SD and any other DMA capable
> south-cluster component on VC0. Similarly it is possible to mark kernel
> memory as non-SMM mode read/write only or to mark BIOS runtime memory as SMM
> mode accessible only depending on the particular memory footprint on a given
> system.
> 
> On an IMR violation Quark SoC X1000 systems are configured to reset the
> system, so ensuring that the IMR memory map is consistent with the EFI
> provided memory map is critical to ensure no IMR violations reset the
> system.
> 
> The API for accessing IMRs is based on MTRR code but doesn't provide a /proc
> or /sys interface to manipulate IMRs. Defining the size and extent of IMRs
> is exclusively the domain of in-kernel code.

Do the applications normally need to manipulate IMRs? Would it be
possible to do all IMR manipulations in the bootloader?

-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html