On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 6:26 AM, Alexander Gordeev <agordeev@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 01:40:48PM -0600, Bjorn Helgaas wrote: >> >> Can you quantify the benefit of this? Can't a device already use >> >> MSI-X to request exactly the number of vectors it can use? (I know >> > >> > A Intel AHCI chipset requires 16 vectors written to MME while advertises >> > (via AHCI registers) and uses only 6. Even attempt to init 8 vectors results >> > in device's fallback to 1 (!). >> >> Is the fact that it uses only 6 vectors documented in the public spec? > > Yes, it is documented in ICH specs. Out of curiosity, do you have a pointer to this? It looks like it uses one vector per port, and I'm wondering if the reason it requests 16 is because there's some possibility of a part with more than 8 ports. >> Is this a chipset erratum? Are there newer versions of the chipset >> that fix this, e.g., by requesting 8 vectors and using 6, or by also >> supporting MSI-X? > > No, this is not an erratum. The value of 8 vectors is reserved and could > cause undefined results if used. As I read the spec (PCI 3.0, sec 6.8.1.3), if MMC contains 0b100 (requesting 16 vectors), the OS is allowed to allocate 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 vectors. If allocating 8 vectors and writing 0b011 to MME causes undefined results, I'd say that's a chipset defect. >> I know this conserves vector numbers. What does that mean in real >> user-visible terms? Are there systems that won't boot because of this >> issue, and this patch fixes them? Does it enable bigger >> configurations, e.g., more I/O devices, than before? > > Visibly, it ceases logging messages ('ahci 0000:00:1f.2: irq 107 for > MSI/MSI-X') for IRQs that are not shown in /proc/interrupts later. > > No, it does not enable/fix any existing hardware issue I am aware of. > It just saves a couple of interrupt vectors, as Michael put it (10/16 > to be precise). However, interrupt vectors space is pretty much scarce > resource on x86 and a risk of exhausting the vectors (and introducing > quota i.e) has already been raised AFAIR. I'm not too concerned about the logging issue. If necessary, we could tweak that message somehow. Interrupt vector space is the issue I would worry about, but I think I'm going to put this on the back burner until it actually becomes a problem. >> Do you know how Windows handles this? Does it have a similar interface? > > Have no clue, TBH. Can try to investigate if you see it helpful. No, don't worry about investigating. I was just curious because if Windows *did* support something like this, that would be an indication that there's a significant problem here and we might need to solve it, too. But it sounds like we can safely ignore it for now. Bjorn -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html