[PATCH v3 00/32] PCI: fix config and I/O Address space memory mappings

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 08:30:40AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> My point with nopost() is that it's never ok to silently downgrade it.
> Code written with the assumption that there is no posting will be
> *incorrect* if posting happens. We do live with that "bug" today indeed
> but once we have that accessors we might start growing more code that
> relies on the specific attribute that things aren't posted and will be
> wrong on all the archs providing the default implementation.
> 
> This is why I insist that pgprot_nopost() if it exists globally, should
> return NULL when the semantic cannot be provided.

Now you're not talking sense.  pgprot_nopost() does _not_ return a pointer.
You're talking here as if you're still talking about ioremap_nopost().
So, I think you're confused.

> > > Just like the proposed ioremap_nopost(), pgprot_nonposted() is given a
> > > default implementation that uses pgprot_noncached().  Maybe we should
> > > also make pci_remap_iospace() fail if pgprot_nonposted() is not defined
> > > by the architecture?
> 
> Or we *document* that mmap of IO space can result in something that is
> partially non-posted.

Oh, so we _can_ provide an interface that has weaker semantics than it
should provided we document it.

It's insane to have different behaviours from these two interfaces, yet
you seem to have said exactly that in your reply.

It's actually worse than that - what you've just said is that it's okay
for userspace to map IO space with weaker semantics than the PCI
specification states, but it's not okay for kernel space to do that.
Especially as userspace can't know what semantics its going to end up
with, this seems to be a very strange stance to take.

I'd say that if we can't offer the no-posting behaviour that PCI
specifies, then we shouldn't be exposing IO mappings to userspace.

-- 
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