[GIT PULL v2 1/4] ARM: tegra: IOMMU support for v3.19

Thierry Reding thierry.reding at gmail.com
Tue Dec 2 03:51:24 PST 2014


On Mon, Dec 01, 2014 at 06:55:01PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Monday 01 December 2014 16:05:54 Thierry Reding wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 11:20:19PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 26 November 2014, Thierry Reding wrote:
> > > > Hi ARM SoC maintainers,
> > > > 
> > > > The following changes since commit 0690cbd2e55a72a8eae557c389d1a136ed9fa142:
> > > > 
> > > >   powerpc/iommu: Rename iommu_[un]map_sg functions (2014-11-18 11:30:01 +0100)
> > > > 
> > > > are available in the git repository at:
> > > > 
> > > >   git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tegra/linux.git tags/tegra-for-3.19-iommu-rebased
> > > > 
> > > > for you to fetch changes up to 37d21f8918f2aa2289036cc778ee188951e53288:
> > > > 
> > > >   memory: Add NVIDIA Tegra memory controller support (2014-11-26 09:45:02 +0100)
> > > > 
> > > > Here's a version of the pull request rebased on top of Joerg's core
> > > > branch from the IOMMU tree. It has the advantage of having resolved
> > > > the merge conflicts and the disadvantage of pulling in v3.18-rc3.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Hi Thierry,
> > > 
> > > sorry for taking my time on this, I had some concerns when I first
> > > looked at the memory controller driver and binding (after I got your
> > > pull request), and wanted to be sure everything is fine before I merge
> > > it.
> > > 
> > > Pulling in v3.18-rc3 is not a problem, since the next/soc branch is
> > > already based on -rc3 (you can see that yourself if you check out the
> > > branch from the arm-soc tree), and I'm absolutely fine with merging
> > > either v1 or v2 of this, the conflict seems harmless, and so does 
> > > pulling in the dependency.
> > > 
> > > The extra attention for the binding is because the base iommu binding
> > > is still very new and gives some options to driver authors, and I want
> > > to make sure we are setting a good example for others to look at.
> > > My problem is mainly lack of understanding for your hardware requirements,
> > > so hopefully you can clarify this all and I can just merge it, or we
> > > find an easy way to change the code if I have stumbled on a problem.
> > > 
> > > My main question is about the relation between 'swgroup' and 'id'
> > > settings. What do the two things mean respectively, does your driver
> > > define how they get combined, or is each master hardcoded to both?
> > 
> > An ID refers to the client ID. Each client ID represents one requester
> > and a set of IDs makes up one SWGROUP. For example there are two display
> > controllers, each being three clients, yet there's only two SWGROUPs for
> > them:
> > 
> > 	SWGROUP dc: - display0a
> > 	            - display0b
> > 	            - display0c
> > 
> > 	SWGROUP dcb: - display0ab
> > 	             - display0bb
> > 	             - display0cb
> > 
> > Each SWGROUP can be assigned a separate address space. That is, an
> > address space for SWGROUP dc will apply for all clients in that group.
> > However it can be additionally specified for which clients in a group
> > IOMMU address translation should be enabled. Theoretically one could
> > enable translation only for display0a and display0b, but not for
> > display0c. I don't immediately see when that would be desirable, hence
> > the driver always enables translation for all clients in a group.
> 
> Ok, I see. So specifying both SWGROUP and ID in DT would let you do
> that, but you don't think anybody ever wants it.

Correct. I don't think it makes sense and it'd require significant work
in a driver to know which buffers need translation and which don't. In
fact I don't think you could make that work with the current frameworks
because both the IOMMU and DMA APIs operate at a struct device level. A
client could therefore not be distinguished from another.

> > > I generally dislike having SoC-specific lookup tables in drivers for
> > > things that could be fully described in DT, so I really want to understand
> > > why you added those tables.
> > 
> > What exactly is your concern with these tables? Is it the size? Roughly
> > these are 3.5 KiB of .rodata per SoC generation. If that's too much I
> > think I could perhaps get that down to something like half of it using
> > bitfields (reg could be 11 bits, bit/shift could be 5, so that both fit
> > into a single u16 instead of 2 u32). That'll probably increase code size
> > a little to extract these fields, but that may be a suitable tradeoff.
> 
> I'm not too worried about the size. My concern is mainly the fact that
> you have to add a new file for each new SoC, which is not necessary if
> we can find a way to make the binding generic enough to cover any variant.

There's nothing generic about this. The way how you control the various
groups might be the same, but the set of groups and clients varies per
generation. The tables not only allow us to have simple parameterized
code to handle the various generations, it also gives us a way to
specify which groups and clients are valid for a given generation and
sanity check the DT content.

> It's less of an issue for the particular implementation from NVIDIA,
> since you have a relatively low number of SoC designs coming out,
> compared to some of the other vendors, and in particular compared to
> the ARM SMMU that will be shared across many vendors. I definitely
> would not want to see per-SoC files for each chip that contains an
> ARM SMMU, and I also would like to see IOMMU drivers in general being
> implemented in a similar fashion, and your driver sets an example that
> others should better not copy IMHO ;-)

Actually I disagree. I think this sets exactly the right example. Since
none of these associations are configurable or change from board to
board, everything is implied by the compatible property. Adding this
data to DT would therefore be completely redundant.

Moving the data to DT would also mean that we would be adding a table of
registers to the DT. There used to be a time when there was concensus at
least that that was a really bad idea. Has that changed in the last few
years?

I do agree that it makes sense not to have these tables for completely
generic IOMMUs like the ARM SMMU, though, but like you said, those are
generic because they are designed to be used in a variety of SoCs. The
Tegra SMMU is very tightly coupled with each specific SoC generation.

> > > The .smmu.reg and .smmu.bit settings seem to directly correlate to the
> > > .id value in the table, so I'm assuming you could derive one from the
> > > other if it was advantagous.
> > 
> > This could be done using something like this:
> > 
> > 	unsigned int reg = 0x228 + (id / 32) * 4;
> > 	unsigned int bit = id % 32;
> > 
> > However there are a couple of entries that are special, notable the PTC
> > and MPCORE clients. Those have a SWGROUP but none of these enable bits,
> > so I can't immediately think of a way to do that nicely. We'd probably
> > have to hard-code checks for that, making it somewhat brittle. Having
> > this all in a simple lookup table makes this really straightforward and
> > easy to verify for correctness by comparing the table to internal files
> > that specify these registers.
> 
> I see.
> 
> > > The name is only used for debugging purposes and we could also leave
> > > it out if we had a way to kill off the other fields of the table.
> > 
> > The name is also used in error messages to clarify where an error comes
> > from. That's been very essential in tracking down various issues in some
> > drivers (DRM primarily).
> 
> Couldn't you print the DT path of the DMA master to provide the
> same information?

To do that I would need to keep a mapping of struct device_node * to
client ID. And it would only give me a single name even for devices with
multiple clients.

Going back to the DRM example I gave earlier, it's been extremely
valuable for the memory controller to spit out the exact name of the
faulting client, because it immediately indicates whether there's
something wrong with the root window (window A) or one of the overlays
(window B or C).

> > > In the comment you mention that the latency allowance is set up to the
> > > hardware defaults, so I guess in the current version this is not required,
> > > but the .la.reg/shift/mask fields can't be determined from the other
> > > fields. This means in order to implement the extension for changing the
> > > setting in the future, you'd have to add some other way of communicating
> > > it without the table, right?
> > 
> > Right, there is no programmatic way to derive the latency allowance data
> > from the ID. They're more or less randomly spread across the registers.
> > 
> > Note that there are other knobs in the memory controller associated with
> > the memory clients, though they aren't in use (yet). Having this kind of
> > table gives us a very nice way of collecting the per-client data in one
> > location and then use that for register programming.
> 
> So what does "lacency allowance" actually mean, and why do you need to
> access this field from Linux? I'm not too familiar with memory controller
> concepts, so I'm sorry if this is an RTFM question.

Essentially this is an input to the memory controller's arbitration unit
and sets an upper bound on the latency of outstanding requests. Under
memory bandwidth pressure this allows the memory controller to give
priority to requests from clients with lower latency tolerance. Display
for example would usually have a fairly low tolerance because stalling
requests for too long will cause the pixel data FIFO to underrun and
cause visual artifacts.

So to make this work the goal is for memory clients to register their
bandwidth needs with some central entity that uses it along with the
memory client's FIFO depth to compute the value for the latency
allowance register. The unit for this value is an internal tick from the
memory controller, in turn based on the EMC frequency. Therefore this is
usually only computed once for a given configuration and can remain the
same across EMC frequency changes.

There are patches in the works to add support for EMC frequency scaling
and also latency allowance programming.

> > > Back to the swgroup/id fields: if you need both, would it make sense
> > > to have #iommu-cells = <2> and pass both from the dma master device?
> > 
> > I think they are really orthogonal settings. Client IDs have nothing to
> > do with the IOMMU specifically. The IOMMU is primarily concerned with
> > the SWGROUP. The driver only makes sure that IOVA translation is enabled
> > for each client in a SWGROUP.
> 
> Hmm, where are they actually needed both at the same time then? IOW,
> why can't the IOMMU driver just deal with the SWGROUP and ignore the
> table with the ID and LA values, leaving that to the memory controller
> driver?

The IOMMU driver still needs the list of clients so that it can enable
translation for each of the clients pertaining to a given group. That
is, if display controller A requests IOVA translation this maps to
TEGRA_SWGROUP_DC, but internally in order for the translation to
actually happen we also need to enable IOVA translation for each of the
clients in that group.

Note that we do share the memory clients table between the MC and the
IOMMU drivers, so there's not actually any duplication there.

Thierry
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