Re: [PATCH] ARM: bcm2835: Use 0x4 prefix for DMA bus addresses to SDRAM.

From: Stephen Warren
Date: Tue May 05 2015 - 15:29:30 EST


On 05/04/2015 01:33 PM, Eric Anholt wrote:
There exists a tiny MMU, configurable only by the VC (running the
closed firmware), which maps from the ARM's physical addresses to bus
addresses. These bus addresses determine the caching behavior in the
VC's L1/L2 (note: separate from the ARM's L1/L2) according to the top
2 bits. The bits in the bus address mean:

From the VideoCore processor:
0x0... L1 and L2 cache allocating and coherent
0x4... L1 non-allocating, but coherent. L2 allocating and coherent
0x8... L1 non-allocating, but coherent. L2 non-allocating, but coherent
0xc... SDRAM alias. Cache is bypassed. Not L1 or L2 allocating or coherent

From the GPU peripherals (note: all peripherals bypass the L1
cache. The ARM will see this view once through the VC MMU):
0x0... Do not use
0x4... L1 non-allocating, and incoherent. L2 allocating and coherent.
0x8... L1 non-allocating, and incoherent. L2 non-allocating, but coherent
0xc... SDRAM alias. Cache is bypassed. Not L1 or L2 allocating or coherent

The 2835 firmware always configures the MMU to turn ARM physical
addresses with 0x0 top bits to 0x4, meaning present in L2 but
incoherent with L1. However, any bus addresses we were generating in
the kernel to be passed to a device had 0x0 bits. That would be a
reserved (possibly totally incoherent) value if sent to a GPU
peripheral like USB, or L1 allocating if sent to the VC (like a
firmware property request). By setting dma-ranges, all of the devices
below it get a dev->dma_pfn_offset, so that dma_alloc_coherent() and
friends return addresses with 0x4 bits and avoid cache incoherency.

This matches the behavior in the downstream 2708 kernel (see
BUS_OFFSET in arch/arm/mach-bcm2708/include/mach/memory.h).

diff --git a/arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm2835.dtsi b/arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm2835.dtsi

#address-cells = <1>;
#size-cells = <1>;
ranges = <0x7e000000 0x20000000 0x02000000>;
+ dma-ranges = <0x40000000 0x00000000 0x1f000000>;

Oh well that's a nice and simple patch; I had been avoiding looking into fixing the kernel for this since I was worried it'd be rather complex!

I'm puzzled why the length cell of ranges and dma-ranges differs though? Assuming there's a good explanation for that,

Acked-by: Stephen Warren <swarren@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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