Re: [PATCH 2/2] x86/pat: add functions to query specific cache mode availability

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>]

On 20.05.2022 10:30, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
> On 5/20/2022 2:59 AM, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
>> On 5/20/2022 2:05 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>> On 20.05.2022 06:43, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
>>>> On 5/4/22 5:14 AM, Juergen Gross wrote:
>>>>> On 04.05.22 10:31, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>>>> On 03.05.2022 15:22, Juergen Gross wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ... these uses there are several more. You say nothing on why 
>>>>>> those want
>>>>>> leaving unaltered. When preparing my earlier patch I did inspect them
>>>>>> and came to the conclusion that these all would also better 
>>>>>> observe the
>>>>>> adjusted behavior (or else I couldn't have left pat_enabled() as the
>>>>>> only predicate). In fact, as said in the description of my earlier 
>>>>>> patch, in
>>>>>> my debugging I did find the use in i915_gem_object_pin_map() to be 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> problematic one, which you leave alone.
>>>>> Oh, I missed that one, sorry.
>>>> That is why your patch would not fix my Haswell unless
>>>> it also touches i915_gem_object_pin_map() in
>>>> drivers/gpu/drm/i915/gem/i915_gem_pages.c
>>>>
>>>>> I wanted to be rather defensive in my changes, but I agree at least 
>>>>> the
>>>>> case in arch_phys_wc_add() might want to be changed, too.
>>>> I think your approach needs to be more aggressive so it will fix
>>>> all the known false negatives introduced by bdd8b6c98239
>>>> such as the one in i915_gem_object_pin_map().
>>>>
>>>> I looked at Jan's approach and I think it would fix the issue
>>>> with my Haswell as long as I don't use the nopat option. I
>>>> really don't have a strong opinion on that question, but I
>>>> think the nopat option as a Linux kernel option, as opposed
>>>> to a hypervisor option, should only affect the kernel, and
>>>> if the hypervisor provides the pat feature, then the kernel
>>>> should not override that,
>>> Hmm, why would the kernel not be allowed to override that? Such
>>> an override would affect only the single domain where the
>>> kernel runs; other domains could take their own decisions.
>>>
>>> Also, for the sake of completeness: "nopat" used when running on
>>> bare metal has the same bad effect on system boot, so there
>>> pretty clearly is an error cleanup issue in the i915 driver. But
>>> that's orthogonal, and I expect the maintainers may not even care
>>> (but tell us "don't do that then").
> 
> Actually I just did a test with the last official Debian kernel
> build of Linux 5.16, that is, a kernel before bdd8b6c98239 was
> applied. In fact, the nopat option does *not* break the i915 driver
> in 5.16. That is, with the nopat option, the i915 driver loads
> normally on both the bare metal and on the Xen hypervisor.
> That means your presumption (and the presumption of
> the author of bdd8b6c98239) that the "nopat" option was
> being observed by the i915 driver is incorrect. Setting "nopat"
> had no effect on my system with Linux 5.16. So after doing these
> tests, I am against the aggressive approach of breaking the i915
> driver with the "nopat" option because prior to bdd8b6c98239,
> nopat did not break the i915 driver. Why break it now?

Because that's, in my understanding, is the purpose of "nopat"
(not breaking the driver of course - that's a driver bug -, but
having an effect on the driver).

Jan