Re: [RFC v2 01/39] Kconfig: introduce HAS_IOPORT option and select it as necessary

From: Geert Uytterhoeven
Date: Fri May 06 2022 - 09:09:14 EST


On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 2:56 PM David Laight <David.Laight@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: Maciej W. Rozycki
> > Sent: 06 May 2022 13:27
> > On Fri, 6 May 2022, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > > If this is PCI/PCIe indeed, then an I/O access is just a different bit
> > > > pattern put on the bus/in the TLP in the address phase. So what is there
> > > > inherent to the s390 architecture that prevents that different bit pattern
> > > > from being used?
> > >
> > > The hardware design for PCI on s390 is very different from any other
> > > architecture, and more abstract. Rather than implementing MMIO register
> > > access as pointer dereference, this is a separate CPU instruction that
> > > takes a device/bar plus offset as arguments rather than a pointer, and
> > > Linux encodes this back into a fake __iomem token.
> >
> > OK, that seems to me like a reasonable and quite a clean design (on the
> > hardware side).
> >
> > So what happens if the instruction is given an I/O rather than memory BAR
> > as the relevant argument? Is the address space indicator bit (bit #0)
> > simply ignored or what?
>
> You don't understand something...
>
> For a memory BAR pci_ioremap() returns a token that can be used with readl().
> On most architectures readl() is just a memory access.
> This all fails on an I/O BAR.
>
> For an I/O BAR you want a similar pair of functions.
> On x86 the access function would need to use the 'in/out' instructions but
> there is no requirement for the token to be the native io port number.
> On many non-x86 architectures the access function would be a simple memory
> access - but a specific system (eg many ppc) may never actually allow
> such mappings to succeed.
>
> You might also want a third PCI mapping function that can map a memory
> BAR or an I/O BAR - with a suitable access function.
> On x86 this would need something like ioread8() for accesses.
> Except that function uses small integers for io port numbers
> (which is inherently dangerous).
>
> Nothing except the architecture specific implementation of the function
> to access an io BAR would ever go near a function called inb().
>
> The same is really true for other bus type - including ISA and EISA.
> (Ignoring the horrid of probing ISI bus devices - hopefully they
> are in the ACPI tables??_
> If a driver is probed on a ISA bus there ought to be functions
> equivalent to pci_ioremap() (for both memory and IO addresses)
> that return tokens appropriate for the specific bus.
>
> That is all a different load of churn.

A loooong time ago, it was suggested to add register accessor
functions to struct device, so e.g. readl(dev, offset) would call
into these accessors, which would implement the bus-specific behavior.
No more worries about readl(), __raw_readl(), ioread32b(), or whatever
quirk is needed, at the (small on nowadays' machines) expense of
some indirection...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds