Hello, I've been working with the Linux PCIe framework for a few weeks, and there are still a few things that remain unclear to me. I thought I'd group them in a single message. 1) If I understand correctly, PCI defines 3 types of (address?) "spaces" - configuration - memory - I/O I think PCI has its roots in x86, where there are separate instructions for I/O accesses and memory accesses (with MMIO sitting somewhere in the middle). I'm on ARMv7 which doesn't have I/O instructions AFAIK. I'm not sure what the I/O address space is used for in PCIe, especially since I was told that one may map I/O-type registers (in my understanding, registers for which accesses cause side effects) within mem space. 2) On my platform, there are two revisions of the PCIe controller. Rev1 muxes config and mem inside a 256 MB window, and doesn't support I/O space. Rev2 muxes all 3 spaces inside a 256 MB window. Ard has stated that this model is not supported by Linux. AFAIU, the reason is that accesses may occur concurrently (especially on SMP systems). Thus tweaking a bit before the actual access necessarily creates a race condition. I wondered if there might be (reasonable) software work-arounds, in your experience? 3) What happens if a device requires more than 256 MB of mem space? (Is that common? What kind of device? GPUs?) Our controller supports a remapping "facility" to add an offset to the bus address. Is such a feature supported by Linux at all? The problem is that this creates another race condition, as setting the offset register before an access may occur concurrently on two cores. Perhaps 256 MB is plenty on a 32-bit embedded device? 4) The HW dev is considering the following fix. Instead of muxing the address spaces, provide smaller exclusive spaces. For example [0x5000_0000, 0x5400_0000] for config (64MB) [0x5400_0000, 0x5800_0000] for I/O (64MB) [0x5800_0000, 0x6000_0000] for mem (128MB) That way, bits 26:27 implicitly select the address space 00 = config 01 = I/O 1x = mem This would be more in line with what Linux expects, right? Are these sizes acceptable? 64 MB config is probably overkill (we'll never have 64 devices on this board). 64 MB for I/O is probably plenty. The issue might be mem space? Thanks to anyone who can shine some light on either of these points for me :-) Regards.
