ath11k swiotlb buffer is full (on IMX8M with 4GiB DRAM)

[Baochen Qiang]

On 12/11/2024 7:06 AM, Tim Harvey wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 9, 2024 at 8:11 PM Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 09, 2024 at 11:15:02AM -0800, Tim Harvey wrote:
>>> After a lot of back and forth and investigation this is due to the
>>> IMX8M SoC's not having an IOMMU thus swiotlb is being used and ath11k
>>> is requesting some buffers that are too large for swiotlb to provide.
>>> There is a specific patch which added the HAL_WBM2SW_RELEASE buffers
>>> to cacheable memory that could be reverted to fix this but the concern
>>> was that it would impact performance moving those buffers to
>>> non-cacheable memory (there are three ~1MiB buffers being allocated):
>>> commit d0e2523bfa9cb ("ath11k: allocate HAL_WBM2SW_RELEASE ring from
>>> cacheable memory").
>>
>> The combination of "buffers" and "swiotlb" sounds like Robin was right
>> below.
>>
>>> The chain of events as best I can tell are:
>>>
>>> commit 6452f0a3d565 ("ath11k: allocate dst ring descriptors from
>>> cacheable memory")
>>> - Nov 12 2021 (made it into Linux 5.17)
>>> - changes allocation of reo_dst rings to cacheable memory to allow
>>> cached descriptor access to optimize CPU usage
>>> - this is flawed because it uses virt_to_phys() to allocate cacheable
>>> memory which does not work on systems with an IOMMU enabled or using
>>> software IOMMU (swiotlb); this causes a kernel crash on client
>>> association
>>
>> And this is where it started to take a wrong turn, that everyhing
>> later basically made worse.  If you have long living and potentially
>> large DMA allocations, you need to use dma_alloc_* interfaces.
>>
>> 5.17 already had dma_alloc_pages for quite a while which was and still is
>> the proper interface to use.  For much older kernel you'd be stuck
>> with dma_alloc_noncoherent or dma_alloc_attrs with the right flag,
>> but even that would have been much better.
> 
> Christoph,
> 
> I'm not clear what you are suggesting be done here. Are you suggesting
> that ath11k has been using the wrong mechanism by calling
> dma_map_single for cached DMA buffers? I'm not all that familiar with
> ath11k so I can't tell what buffers are considered long living.

those buffers are allocated when driver load and freed when driver unload, so IMO they are
long living.

> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Tim