Re: [PATCH 2/3] PCI: Handle device quirks when accessing sysfs resource entries

Myron Stowe
2013-03-22T16:46:44Z

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Myron Stowe <myron.stowe@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 6:51 PM, Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 03/20/2013 10:35 PM, Myron Stowe wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Sysfs includes entries to memory regions that back a PCI device's BARs.
>>>> The pci-sysfs entries backing I/O Port BARs can be accessed by userspace,
>>>> providing direct access to the device's registers. File permissions
>>>> prevent random users from accessing the device's registers through these
>>>> files, but don't stop a privileged app that chooses to ignore the purpose
>>>> of these files from doing so.
>>>>
>>>> There are devices with abnormally strict restrictions with respect to
>>>> accessing their registers; aspects that are typically handled by the
>>>> device's driver. When these access restrictions are not followed - as
>>>> when a userspace app such as "udevadm info --attribute-walk
>>>> --path=/sys/..." parses though reading all the device's sysfs entries - it
>>>> can cause such devices to fail.
>>>>
>>>> This patch introduces a quirking mechanism that can be used to detect
>>>> accesses that do no meet the device's restrictions, letting a device
>>>> specific method intervene and decide how to progress.
>>>>
>>>> Reported-by: Xiangliang Yu <yuxiangl@marvell.com>
>>>> Signed-off-by: Myron Stowe <myron.stowe@redhat.com>
>>>
>>>
>>> I honestly don't think there's much point in even attempting this strategy.
>>> This list of devices in the quirk can't possibly be complete. It would
>>> likely be easier to enumerate a white-list of devices that can deal with
>>> their IO ports being read willy-nilly than a blacklist of those that don't,
>>> as there's likely countless devices that fall into this category. Even if
>>> they don't choke as badly as these ones do, it's quite likely that bad
>>> behavior will result.
>>
>> For the device in question, it seems abnormally restrictive in its
>> access limitations to BAR1 and BAR3. The device reserves 4 Bytes of
>> I/O Port space for these BARs, which is likely based on PCI's DWord
>> based protocol, but "chokes (we still have not received any specifics
>> on this yet)" on any access other than a single Byte access at offset
>> 0x2 (x86 supports 1, 2, and 4 Byte I/O Port accesses). This seems to
>> imply that the device did not back the other three reserved Bytes it
>> claims in any way, which again, seems peculiar to this particular
>> device as other similar devices tend to back the reserved bytes they
>> claim and return 0's when accessed.
>
> I don't think it's really that unusual. IO ports are weird, they're
> not necessarily emulating any kind of normal memory - doing a 32-bit
> access on IO port 0 isn't necessarily equivalent at all to doing
> separate 8-bit accesses on IO ports 0, 1, 2 and 3 for example. They
> can do completely different things. For legacy SFF ATA controllers,
> IIRC most of the IO ports only expect 8-bit accesses other than the
> PIO data register which can do 16 or 32-bit accesses (which just gives
> you a different amount of data when doing different size reads from
> the same location - it doesn't give you the data for the IO ports 2 or
> 3 bytes ahead of that when doing a 32-bit read, like you might expect
> if you were thinking of it like memory).

Very good point; I did have a more memory based mindset.

> So it's not too shocking that
> the designer of these Marvell devices didn't pay too much attention to
> what happens if you access the ports in an unexpected way.
>
> Most devices tend not to use IO ports any more in favor of MMIO,
> except for legacy devices or devices implementing a legacy interface
> (like the SFF ATA portion of these Marvell controllers). In those old
> setups, doing funny things with IO port space is more common. Also,
> the fact that IO port space tends to be somewhat precious leads to
> this sort of thing too.
>
>>
>> So in the case where two entities such as the devices driver and an
>> app like 'udevadm' are *not* simultaneously accessing it, so in effect
>> the device is idle with no device driver attached and a user app like
>> 'udevadm' accesses it: do you still contend that there are countless
>> devices that will not deal with their IO ports being read willy-nilly?
>
> Perhaps not "countless" but more "uncountable" in that there's no real
> way to tell which devices may have issues, only to know that it's
> quite possible that many devices may.

So this suggests that we will never be able to deal with a userspace
app accessing device registers in a unknowledgable, random, fashion -
the exact situation we are currently in today. We could get to the
point of supporting UIO drivers, which would be more like device
drivers and have intimate detailed knowledge of what they are driving
and which would also introduce some of the mutual-exclusive ownership
issues we have talked about, but not unknowing userspace apps.

As such, your first suggestion below to enforce the mutual-exclusion
aspects that are necessary is still not enough to solve the current
issue being encountered. An idle device would allow 'udevadm' to
acquire ownership and the sysfs based access to BAR1 would end in
catastrophe due to the device's strict access restrictions to this
BARs I/O Port region. I also agree that the whitelist/blacklist
tactic seems like a complete slippery slope. So where does that leave
us in trying to solve this issue?

Xianglinag: could you elaborate on the exact way the device is failing
due to the DWord I/O Port read of BAR1 and how that leads to the
platform hanging as this is still not understood and a lot of people
are confused by this? We understand why this access is invalid for
this device (i.e. the BE [Byte Enable] discussion) but we don't
understand how such an access attempt ends up so catastrophic, causing
the platform to hang.

>
>>
>> The reason I ask is related to what I stated in the cover [PATCH 0/3]
>> - "If on the other hand, consensus is that we need userspace device
>> register access capabilities - say for UIO drivers or such - then,
>> depending on the tact taken, we'll need this solution, or something
>> like it, as part of that overall strategy." So, if it isn't too
>> uncommon for devices to choke with normal I/O Port accesses then I
>> believe that this solution would be part of a larger strategy to
>> support userspace direct access to devices and also works as a
>> compromise for the immediate issue today.
>>
>>
>> You make some good suggestions below on possible tactics related to
>> allowing userspace access to device registers but I question whether
>> or not we really want, or need, to. Are we, by de-facto, just
>> assuming we need to? Is there consensus that Linux needs to support
>> such functionality? Yes, we are already there (to some extent) with
>> commit 8633328 but I think we are seeing the implications of such a
>> direction and we also know that the tact that this commit took should
>> be going away when VFIO matures.
>>
>> Thanks for participating in this conversation - you helped in
>> understanding the real root cause in the originating thread and have
>> brought up some good points to consider,
>> Myron
>>
>>>
>>> I think there's a few things that need to be done:
>>>
>>> -Fix the bug in udevadm that caused it to trawl through these files
>>> willy-nilly,
>>>
>>> -Fix the kernel so that access through these files complies with the
>>> kernel's mechanisms for claiming IO/memory regions to prevent access
>>> conflicts (i.e. opening these files should claim the resource region they
>>> refer to, and should fail with EBUSY or something if another process or a
>>> kernel driver is using it).
>>>
>>> -Reconsider whether supporting read/write on the resource files for IO port
>>> regions like these makes any sense. Obviously mmap isn't very practical for
>>> IO port access on x86 but you could even do something like an ioctl for this
>>> purpose. Not very many pieces of software would need to access these files
>>> so it's likely OK if the API is a bit ugly. That would prevent something
>>> like grepping through sysfs from generating port accesses to random devices.
>>> --
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