Re: b44 driver causes panic when using swiotlb

From: Chuck Ebbert
Date: Tue Feb 01 2011 - 16:22:15 EST


On Tue, 1 Feb 2011 10:28:00 +0900
FUJITA Tomonori <fujita.tomonori@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> swiotlb allocates the bounce buffer when a system boots up. We can't
> allocate much in GFP_DMA. swiotlb uses somewhere under 4GB. So it
> can't help devices that have odd dma_mask (that is, except for 4GB).
>
> Unfortunately, Such device needs to do own custom bouncing or needs
> their subsystem to does that.

I think we're chasing the wrong problem here.

swiotlb uses alloc_bootmem_low_pages() to try to get buffers as low
in memory as possible. I asked someone who is hitting this bug to
try 2.6.36 and he reports the buffers really are low there:

2.6.36: 5c00000
2.6.37: db600000

So something happened very early in the 2.6.37-rc cycle that changed
this behavior. I tried looking at the bootmem code but could not see
the problem. The only related option I could find in .config was this:

# CONFIG_NO_BOOTMEM is not set

It was set this way in both .36 and .37.
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