Re: [PATCH] arm64: dts: qcom: sc8280xp: fix PCIe DMA coherency

On Fri, Nov 25, 2022 at 07:56:25PM +0530, Manivannan Sadhasivam wrote:

On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 03:25:01PM +0100, Johan Hovold wrote:

quoted

The devices on the SC8280XP PCIe buses are cache coherent and must be
marked as such to avoid data corruption.

A coherent device can, for example, end up snooping stale data from the
caches instead of using data written by the CPU through the
non-cacheable mapping which is used for consistent DMA buffers for
non-coherent devices.

Also, the device may write into the L2 cache (or whatever cache that is
accessible) if there is an entry and the CPU may invalidate it before reading
from the DMA buffer. This will end up in a data loss.

I mentioned the above as an example, but clearly it can affect also the
other direction (e.g. as described below).

quoted

Note that this is much more likely to happen since commit c44094eee32f
("arm64: dma: Drop cache invalidation from arch_dma_prep_coherent()")
that was added in 6.1 and which removed the cache invalidation when
setting up the non-cacheable mapping.

Marking the PCIe devices as coherent specifically fixes the intermittent
NVMe probe failures observed on the Thinkpad X13s, which was due to
corruption of the submission and completion queues. This was typically
observed as corruption of the admin submission queue (with well-formed
completion):

	could not locate request for tag 0x0
	nvme nvme0: invalid id 0 completed on queue 0

or corruption of the admin or I/O completion queues (malformed
completion):

	could not locate request for tag 0x45f
	nvme nvme0: invalid id 25695 completed on queue 25965

presumably as these queues are small enough to not be allocated using
CMA which in turn make them more likely to be cached (e.g. due to
accesses to nearby pages through the cacheable linear map). Increasing
the buffer sizes to two pages to force CMA allocation also appears to
make the problem go away.

I don't think the problem will go away if the allocation happens from CMA
region. It may just decrease the chances of cache hit but it could always
happen due to the existence of linear mapping with cacheable attribute.

I never claimed it would fix the problem, I explicitly wrote that it
made it less likely to occur (to the point where my reproducer no longer
triggers).

Johan

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