Re: framebuffer corruption due to overlapping stp instructions on arm64

Robin Murphy
2018-08-06T12:42:27Z

On 06/08/18 11:25, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
[...]
>> None of this explains why some transactions fail to make it across
>> entirely. The overlapping writes in question write the same data to
>> the memory locations that are covered by both, and so the ordering in
>> which the transactions are received should not affect the outcome.
>
> You're right that the corruption couldn't be explained just by reordering
> writes. My hypothesis is that the PCIe controller tries to disambiguate
> the overlapping writes, but the disambiguation logic was not tested and it
> is buggy. If there's a barrier between the overlapping writes, the PCIe
> controller won't see any overlapping writes, so it won't trigger the
> faulty disambiguation logic and it works.
>
> Could the ARM engineers look if there's some chicken bit in Cortex-A72
> that could insert barriers between non-cached writes automatically?

I don't think there is, and even if there was I imagine it would have a
pretty hideous effect on non-coherent DMA buffers and the various other
places in which we have Normal-NC mappings of actual system RAM.

> I observe these kinds of corruptions:
> - failing to write a few bytes

That could potentially be explained by the reordering/atomicity issues
Matt mentioned, i.e. the load is observing part of the store, before the
store has fully completed.

> - writing a few bytes that were written 16 bytes before
> - writing a few bytes that were written 16 bytes after

Those sound more like the interconnect or root complex ignoring the byte
strobes on an unaligned burst, of which I think the simplistic view
would be "it's broken".

FWIW I stuck my old Nvidia 7600GT card in my Arm Juno r2 board (2x
Cortex-A72), built your test program natively with GCC 8.1.1 at -O2, and
it's still happily flickering pixels in the corner of the console after
nearly an hour (in parallel with some iperf3 just to ensure plenty of
PCIe traffic). I would strongly suspect this issue is particular to
Armada 8k, so its' probably one for the Marvell folks to take a closer
look at - I believe some previous interconnect issues on those SoCs were
actually fixable in firmware.

Robin.