Re: [PATCH v1 5/9] mmc: sdhci: add Black Sesame Technologies BST C1200 controller driver
From: "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de>
Date: 2025-06-27 13:44:13
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linux-mmc, lkml
On Fri, Jun 27, 2025, at 15:19, Adrian Hunter wrote:
On 27/06/2025 13:22, yangzh0906@thundersoft.com wrote:quoted
Dear Mr. Hunter, Our platform supports 64-bit physical addressing, but the eMMC controller's SRAM-based DMA engine is constrained to a 32-bit address space. When using the standard SDHCI interface, which allocates DDR-based DMA buffers with 64-bit addresses, thedma_map_single() operation fails because the DMA engine cannot handle addresses beyond 32 bits.
dma_map_single() should always succeed on arm64 even if the buffer is outside of the dma mask: On most modern SoCs there is an SMMU/IOMMU that implements the actual mapping, and in the absence of that there is a fallback to SWIOTLB, which is always built-in on arm64.
SDHCI controllers can use 32-bit DMA or 64-bit DMA, however even with 64-bit DMA it is possible to restrict the DMA addresses to 32-bits by setting a 32-bit DMA mask. If the host controller capabilities indicate support for 64-bit DMA but you want the driver to use 32-bit DMA, set SDHCI_QUIRK2_BROKEN_64_BIT_DMA. However, if you want to use 64-bit DMA with only 32-bit DMA addresses you can instead implement sdhci host op ->set_dma_mask() and in that function dma_set_mask_and_coherent(dev, DMA_BIT_MASK(32))
I would not expect an standard SDHCI to be broken like this any more, and if it is, I think the SDHCI_QUIRK2_BROKEN_64_BIT_DMA quirk is more appropriate than overriding the dma_set_mask() operation. What sometimes happens though is that the SoC integration itself is broken, and a 64-bit capable DMA master like SDHCI is connected to a 32-bit bus. In this case the DMA limitation should be described in the device tree, using the "dma-ranges" property of the broken bus node. The SDHCI code then still sets the correct 64-bit DMA mask according for the device, but the dma_map_single() still uses an swiotlb bounce buffer or the IOMMU to work around the bus restriction.
quoted
To resolve this hardware limitation, we implement a bounce buffer allocated via >> dma_alloc_coherent() to satisfy DMA addressing constraints.The bounce buffer should not be needed to satisfy DMA addressing constraints. It is used when SDHCI ADMA (scatter/gather) is broken.
I wonder if the actual problem here is not the addressing limit
but instead the coherency protocol. If the DMA master is cache
coherent but listed as non-coherent in DT, or vice versa, there will
be data corruption for all addresses, and using a dma_alloc_coherent()
bounce buffer may hide this.
Arnd