[QUESTION] Early Write Acknowledge for PCIe configuration space

[John Garry]

On 06/01/2017 11:24, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Friday, January 6, 2017 11:15:22 AM CET John Garry wrote:
>> [apologies if this has been queried before]
>>
>> Hi ARM guys,
>>
>> I have a question about the device memory attributes we assign for PCIe
>> config space for arm64. Currently we use ioremap to map in the config
>> space; this uses nGnRE, which means we enable Early Write Acknowledge.
>>
>> The ARMv8 ARM states that "ARM recommend that No Early Write Acknowledge
>> Hint is used for PCIe configuration writes".
>>
>> I understand a problem with using E is in that configuration write is a
>> non-post operation, which means the RP requires to get the completion
>> ack from the EP The problem here is if CPU writes data to ECAM by E,
>> complete will go back to CPU directly, and maybe at this point the write
>> has not reached the EP.
>>
>> I believe that this may cause ordering issues in PCI read/write. In
>> practice we use non-relaxed readl/writel to access config space, which
>> include the synchronization barriers, which, *as I understand*, even if
>> for full system domain, may be negated by the E attribute for PCIe.
>
> I don't think the barriers in readl/writel are enough here, in particular
> the write barrier is *before* the access to synchronize DMAs
> on RAM with MMIO accesses, which is a bit different from what you
> have here.
>
>> So a question: why is the recommendation in the ARMv8 ARM ignored?
>
> Probably nobody thought about this properly in the Linux drivers. The
> ARMv8 ARM sounds correct here.
>
> I/O space may have the same issue, as it also requires non-posted
> accesses.

Right, so our HW team's recommendation - from ARM's memory model and 
also PCIe order model - is that not only config space but also PCIe 
memory mapped IO has the same attribute (nE).

John

>
> 	Arnd
>
> .
>