Re: framebuffer corruption due to overlapping stp instructions on arm64

Mikulas Patocka
2018-08-08T16:21:36Z

On Wed, 8 Aug 2018, Catalin Marinas wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 02:26:11PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
> > From: Mikulas Patocka
> > > Sent: 08 August 2018 14:47
> > ...
> > > The problem on ARM is that I see data corruption when the overlapping
> > > unaligned writes are done just by a single core.
> >
> > Is this a sequence of unaligned writes (that shouldn't modify the
> > same physical locations) or an aligned write followed by an
> > unaligned one that updates part of the earlier write.
> > (Or the opposite order?)
>
> In the memcpy() case, there can be a sequence of unaligned writes but
> they would not modify the same byte (so no overlapping address at the
> byte level).

They do modify the same byte, but with the same value. Suppose that you
want to copy a piece of data that is between 8 and 16 bytes long. You can
do this:

add src_end, src, len
add dst_end, dst, len
ldr x0, [src]
ldr x1, [src_end - 8]
str x0, [dst]
str x1, [dst_end - 8]

The ARM64 memcpy uses this trick heavily in order to reduce branching, and
this is what makes the PCIe controller choke.

Mikulas