Quoting r. Matthew Wilcox <matthew@xxxxxx>: > Subject: Re: Ordering between PCI config space writes and MMIO reads? > > On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 12:30:22AM -0600, Grant Grundler wrote: > > Can someone provide a quote of the PCI Local bus spec that allows this? > > (Or at least a reference to a spec version and section number) > > PCI-PCI bridges are allowed to do it. If you look in table E-1 of PCI > 2.3, or table 8-3 of PCI-X 2.0, you'll see that a Posted Memory Write > can pass a Delayed Write Request (or in PCI-X, a Memory Write can pass a > Split Write Request). > > So mmiowb() will solve the problem for Altix, but leave everybody else > vulnerable. I actually don't see a way of forcing the config write to > complete before a memory write -- everything is allowed to pass a config > write, even a config read. I initially thought "But only a crack monkey > would implement a system where a config read could pass a config write", > but the spec explains that: > > In most PCI-X implementations, Split Requests are managed in separate > buffers from Split Completions, so Split Requests naturally pass Split > Completions. However, no deadlocks occur if Split Completions block > Split Requests. > > So all this code that checks to see if a write had an effect is unsafe. > I'm a little perturbed by this. It means the only way to reliably > distinguish between a write that hasn't taken effect yet and a bit (say, > MWI) the device hasn't implemented is to do a memory access to the > device. Which is hard when you're trying to program the BARs. > > I suppose this hasn't bitten us before in, what, 7 years of PCI-X, so > it can't be *that* common a thing for bridges to do. And we would have > noticed the BAR sizing code going wrong (as it does config write > followed immediately by config read), so maybe implementations aren't as > crackful as the PCI spec seems to permit them to be. > > I find it really hard to believe the PCI committee have done something > this stupid. There must be another rule somewhere that I'm missing. I think typically CPUs stall until a non-posted operation completes. And since config writes are non posted, pci_config_write_... write .... does not *start* the write until config write has completed. So there's only a single outstanding config operation and that's why there's never any re-ordering, without any need for flushes. Your Altix system seems the weird one here in that CPU actually treats config writes as posted and does not wait for their completion. I wander whether you can do a bus lock or something and force waiting till the completion. This would be much cleaner than trying to fix all drivers. -- MST - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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