[PATCH 15/18] irqchip/apple-aic: Add support for the Apple Interrupt Controller

[Hector Martin]

On 08/02/2021 20.36, Marc Zyngier wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Feb 2021 10:29:23 +0000,
> Arnd Bergmann <arnd at kernel.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 10:25 AM Marc Zyngier <maz at kernel.org> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 04 Feb 2021 20:39:48 +0000, Hector Martin <marcan at marcan.st> wrote:
>>
>>>> +{
>>>> +     return readl(ic->base + reg);
>>>
>>> Please consider using the _relaxed accessors, as I don't think any of
>>> these interacts with memory (apart from IPIs, of course).
>>
>> MSI interrupts require serializing with DMA, so at the minimum I think there
>> needs to be something that ensures that DMA from device into memory
>> has completed before delivering the completion interrupt to a driver. This
>> may already be implied when the AIC is entered, but this is hard to know
>> without actual hardware specs.
> 
> If there is a sync with memory required, it should happen at the point
> where it is Acked, not when masked/unmasked or anything else. And
> given that you want to sync with an external agent (the DMA producer),
> the DMB generated by readl won't save you, as it only orders CPU
> accesses AFAICT.

Found an doc that talks about this, but then... how does the current 
Linux code work anyway for normal use cases?

https://elinux.org/images/7/73/Deacon-weak-to-weedy.pdf

That says dmb is not enough for DMA-control to DMA-data dependencies due 
to speculation, which is what we have here and the situation I described 
(with an IRQ along the way, but that's irrelevant). But that's what 
readl does: a read followed by a dmb(oshld) followed by a control 
dependency (but that needs an isb to take effect). How does this not 
break drivers that read DMA-accessed memory after a readl of a status 
register? I thought that was the point of the non-relaxed functions.

-- 
Hector Martin (marcan at marcan.st)
Public Key: https://mrcn.st/pub