Re: [BISECTED] Regression: Solidrun Clearfog Base won't boot since "PCI: mvebu: Only remap I/O space if configured"

[Andrew Murray]

Hi Thomas,

On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 02:12:03PM +0200, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Mon, 24 Sep 2018 12:13:41 +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> 
> > > But being able to unmap it would also be needed to be able to remove
> > > PCI host controller drivers, and therefore compile them as module, and
> > > make them more like any other drivers.
> > > 
> > > I'm not sure why we need to guarantee that the I/O space is always
> > > mapped:
> > > 
> > >  - It isn't mapped before the PCI controller driver does the mapping.
> > > 
> > >  - There is no reason for it to be accessed when the PCI controller
> > >    driver is not initialized: PCI devices can only be probed and
> > >    initialized when the PCI controller driver is probed/initialized.  
> > 
> > There are historic reasons.  PCI provides ISA IO space, and when you
> > have a machine with ISA peripherals present, the PCI IO space must
> > never be unmapped - if it is, ISA drivers will oops the kernel.  There
> > is no way for a vanishing PCI controller to cause ISA drivers to be
> > unbound.
> > 
> > If you have a host controller that does unmap PCI IO space and you have
> > ISA peripherals with drivers present, unbinding the PCI host controller
> > will remove the IO space mapping, and next time an ISA peripheral
> > touches IO space, the kernel will oops.
> 
> Thanks for sharing some additional technical context on this, very
> useful.
> 
> I have another question though: shouldn't those ISA devices be child
> devices of the PCI controller, if they use some resources of the PCI
> controller ? Could you give an example of such an ISA device driver ?

Legacy VGA also falls into this category - for example
drivers/video/console/vgacon.c will happily use outb/inb macros to hard
coded addresses which are hoped to be present on some PCI/ISA bus.

With regards to ISA drivers - take a look for anything that registers with
isa_register_driver - for example:

drivers/input/touchscreen/htcpen.c
drivers/net/ethernet/3com/3c509.c
drivers/watchdog/ebc-c384_wdt.c

None of these drivers do any kind of mapping before attempting to access
these addresses.

Thanks,

Andrew Murray

> This is just to understand better the issue, because there seems to be
> a kind of hidden dependency between those ISA drivers and the setup of
> the PCI controller.
> 
> > > All other drivers, including on ARM, use pci_remap_iospace(), which
> > > does provide the pci_unmap_iospace() counter part.  
> > 
> > ... which has been created in PCI land just to deal with PCI without
> > regard for the above issue.
> > 
> > However, there's another issue I missed - if you _do_ have ISA
> > peripherals, you likely want the IO space setup from very early on,
> > and you won't be using the new fangled PCI host driver support anyway.
> > That uses pci_map_io_early() rather than pci_ioremap_io() or
> > pci_remap_io().
> 
> OK. There's today a single platform (Footbridge) that uses
> pci_map_io_early(), and it is indeed called through the ->map_io()
> hook, which is very early in the boot process.
> 
> BTW, look at drivers/pcmcia/at91_cf.c. It has ->probe() and ->remove(),
> and does a pci_ioremap_io() in its ->probe(), and nothing in its
> ->remove(). I don't think this driver, compiled as a module, will work
> well after a insmod/rmmod/insmod cycle.
> 
> > > But to me, the general direction is that the ARM-specific
> > > pci_remap_io() API is fading away, and its replacement already provides
> > > an unmapping capability. So why not add the same unmapping capability
> > > to pci_remap_io() ?  
> > 
> > Yes, that would be a good longer term plan - we don't need three
> > different ways to map PCI IO space, but it is development.
> 
> Absolutely. Glad to hear that you agree on the longer term plan.
> 
> > > But we have a regression and we need to fix it. Do you suggest to not
> > > use the new pci_host_probe() API ?  
> > 
> > Well, arguably, the patch that caused the regression is the buggy patch,
> > _not_ the lack of unmapping API for pci_ioremap_io().
> 
> Totally true.
> 
> > Trying to address a regression with further development means that
> > _that_ development needs thought and review, which is a slower
> > process.
> > 
> > I do understand the desire to keep moving forward and never take a
> > step backwards, but sometimes backwards steps are the best way to
> > resolve a regression.  But I also do appreciate that a simple revert
> > in this case is not possible.
> 
> Well, I can revert:
> 
> 42342073e38b50113354944cd51dcfed28d857a1 PCI: mvebu: Convert to use
> pci_host_bridge directly ee1604381a371b3ea6aec7d5e43b6e3f5e153854 PCI:
> mvebu: Only remap I/O space if configured
> 
> so it's not a big deal either. I can revert those, and then resubmit a
> more complete series later on that moves pci-mvebu to use
> pci_remap_iospace().
> 
> > I'll accept your patch on the condition that the ARM private
> > pci_ioremap_io() will go away in the very near future (please _try_
> > to get agreement on that before this patch is merged.)
> 
> Bjorn, Lorenzo, what do you prefer ? 
> 
> If we want to get rid of pci_ioremap_io(), then we need a way to tell
> pci_remap_iospace() the memory attributes that should be used for the
> mapping, because on Armada 38x, we need to map the I/O space mapped
> MT_UNCACHED instead of MT_DEVICE. I'm not sure how to achieve this yet.
> Should pgprot_device() be changed to return MT_UNCACHED on a
> platform-specific basis ? Any other idea ?
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Thomas
> -- 
> Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Bootlin
> Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
> https://bootlin.com
> 
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