Re: [PATCH v2 2/4] spi: Fix cache corruption due to DMA/PIO overlap

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Fri Sep 30 2022 - 08:11:34 EST


On 2022-09-30 12:20, Marek Szyprowski wrote:
Hi,

CCed: Christoph and Robin, as the issue is partially dma-mapping related.

On 27.09.2022 13:21, Vincent Whitchurch wrote:
The SPI core DMA mapping support performs cache management once for the
entire message and not between transfers, and this leads to cache
corruption if a message has two or more RX transfers with both
transfers targeting the same cache line, and the controller driver
decides to handle one using DMA and the other using PIO (for example,
because one is much larger than the other).

Fix it by syncing before/after the actual transfers. This also means
that we can skip the sync during the map/unmap of the message.

Fixes: 99adef310f68 ("spi: Provide core support for DMA mapping transfers")
Signed-off-by: Vincent Whitchurch <vincent.whitchurch@xxxxxxxx>
---

This patch landed in linux next-20220929 as commit 0c17ba73c08f ("spi:
Fix cache corruption due to DMA/PIO overlap"). Unfortunately it causes
kernel oops on one of my test systems:

8<--- cut here ---
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 0000000c
[0000000c] *pgd=00000000
Internal error: Oops: 5 [#1] PREEMPT SMP ARM
Modules linked in: cmac bnep btsdio hci_uart btbcm s5p_mfc btintel
brcmfmac bluetooth videobuf2_dma_contig videobuf2_memops videobuf2_v4l2
videobuf2_common videodev cfg80211 mc ecdh_generic ecc brcmutil
CPU: 0 PID: 12 Comm: kworker/0:1 Not tainted
6.0.0-rc7-next-20220929-dirty #12903
Hardware name: Samsung Exynos (Flattened Device Tree)
Workqueue: events ax88796c_work
PC is at dma_direct_sync_sg_for_device+0x24/0xb8
LR is at spi_transfer_one_message+0x4c4/0xabc
pc : [<c01cbcf0>]    lr : [<c0739fcc>]    psr: 20000013
...
Process kworker/0:1 (pid: 12, stack limit = 0xca429928)
Stack: (0xe0071d38 to 0xe0072000)
...
 dma_direct_sync_sg_for_device from spi_transfer_one_message+0x4c4/0xabc
 spi_transfer_one_message from __spi_pump_transfer_message+0x300/0x770
 __spi_pump_transfer_message from __spi_sync+0x304/0x3f4
 __spi_sync from spi_sync+0x28/0x40
 spi_sync from axspi_read_rxq+0x98/0xc8
 axspi_read_rxq from ax88796c_work+0x7a8/0xf6c
 ax88796c_work from process_one_work+0x288/0x774
 process_one_work from worker_thread+0x44/0x504
 worker_thread from kthread+0xf0/0x124
 kthread from ret_from_fork+0x14/0x2c
Exception stack(0xe0071fb0 to 0xe0071ff8)
...
---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]---

This happens because sg_free_table() doesn't clear table->orig_nents nor
table->nents. If the given spi xfer object is reused without dma-mapped
buffer, then a NULL pointer de-reference happens at table->sgl
spi_dma_sync_for_device()/spi_dma_sync_for_cpu(). A possible fix would
be to zero table->orig_nents in spi_unmap_buf_attrs(). I will send a
patch for this soon.

However, I think that clearing table->orig_nents and table->nents should
be added to __sg_free_table() in lib/scatterlist.c to avoid this kind of
issue in the future. This however will be a significant change that
might break code somewhere, if it relies on the nents/orig_nents value
after calling sg_free_table(). Christoph, Robin - what is your opinion?

Yes, that makes sense to me: the table->nents etc. fields logically describe the list that table->sgl points to, so when it sets that to NULL it seems right to also update the corresponding fields accordingly. I don't see much good reason for code to poking into an sg_table after it's been freed, other that to reinitialise it with sg_alloc_table() which would overwrite those fields anyway, so I can't imagine it's a particularly risky change.

That said, maybe this is something that's better to catch than to paper over? Arguably the real bug here is that spi_unmap_buf() and the new sync functions should use the same "{tx,rx}_buf != NULL" condition that spi_map_buf() used for the DMA mapping decision in the first place.

Thanks,
Robin.



drivers/spi/spi.c | 109 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
1 file changed, 88 insertions(+), 21 deletions(-)

...

Best regards