Re: ibmveth bug?

[Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

Ping on this ... we've tripped the same issue on a different system, it
would appear. Would appreciate if anyone can provide answers to the
questions below.

Thanks,
Nish

On 15.05.2012 [10:01:41 -0700], Nishanth Aravamudan wrote:
> Hi Santiago,
> 
> Are you still working on ibmveth?
> 
> I've found a very sporadic bug with ibmveth in some testing. PAPR
> requires that:
> 
> "Validate the Buffer Descriptor of the receive queue buffer (I/O
> addresses for entire buffer length starting at the spec- ified I/O
> address are translated by the RTCE table, length is a multiple of 16
> bytes, and alignment is on a 16 byte boundary) else H_Parameter."
> 
> but from what I can tell ibmveth.c is not enforcing this last condition:
> 
> 	adapter->rx_queue.queue_addr =
> 		kmalloc(adapter->rx_queue.queue_len, GFP_KERNEL);
> 
> 	...
> 
> 	adapter->rx_queue.queue_dma = dma_map_single(dev,
> 		adapter->rx_queue.queue_addr, adapter->rx_queue.queue_len,
> 		DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL);
> 
> 	...
> 
> 	rxq_desc.fields.address = adapter->rx_queue.queue_dma;
> 
> 	...
> 	
> 
> 	lpar_rc = ibmveth_register_logical_lan(adapter, rxq_desc,
> 		mac_address);
> 	netdev_err(netdev, "buffer TCE:0x%llx filter TCE:0x%llx rxq "
> 	 	"desc:0x%llx MAC:0x%llx\n", adapter->buffer_list_dma,
> 	 	adapter->filter_list_dma, rxq_desc.desc, mac_address);
> 
> And I got on one install attempt:
> 
> [ 39.978430] ibmveth 30000004: eth0: h_register_logical_lan failed with -4
> [ 39.978449] ibmveth 30000004: eth0: buffer TCE:0x1000 filter TCE:0x10000 rxq desc:0x80006010000200a8 MAC:0x56754de8e904
> 
> rxq desc, as you can see is not 16byte aligned. kmalloc() only
> guarantees 8-byte alignment (as does gcc, I think). Initially, I thought
> we could just overallocate the queue_addr and ALIGN() down, but then we
> would need to save the original kmalloc pointer in a new struct member
> per rx_queue.
> 
> So a couple of questions:
> 
> 1) Is my analysis accurate? :)
> 
> 2) How gross would it be to save an extra pointer for every rx_queue?
> 
> 3) Based upon 2), is it better to just go ahead and create our own
> kmem_cache (which gets an alignment specified)?
> 
> For 3), I started coding this, but couldn't find a clean place to
> allocate the kmem_cache itself, as the size of each object depends on
> the run-time characteristics (afaict), but needs to be specified at
> cache creation time. Any insight you could provide would be great!
> 
> Thanks,
> Nish
>  
> -- 
> Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com>
> IBM Linux Technology Center

-- 
Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com>
IBM Linux Technology Center