Re: Explicit IOVA management from a PCIe endpoint driver

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On 2018-09-18 03:06, Stephen Warren wrote:
Joerg, Christoph, Marek, Robin,

I believe that the driver for our PCIe endpoint controller hardware
will need to explicitly manage its IOVA space more than current APIs
allow. I'd like to discuss how to make that possible.

First some background on our hardware:

NVIDIA's Xavier SoC contains a Synopsis Designware PCIe controller.
This can operate in either root port or endpoint mode. I'm
particularly interested in endpoint mode.

Our particular instantiation of this controller exposes a single
function with a single software-controlled PCIe BAR to the PCIe bus
(there are also BARs for access to DMA controller registers and
outbound MSI configuration, which can both be enabled/disabled but not
used for any other purpose). When a transaction is received from the
PCIe bus, the following happens:

1) Transaction is matched against the BAR base/size (in PCIe address
space) to determine whether it "hits" this BAR or not.

2) The transaction's address is processed by the PCIe controller's ATU
(Address Translation Unit), which can re-write the address that the
transaction accesses.

Our particular instantiation of the hardware only has 2 entries in the
ATU mapping table, which gives very little flexibility in setting up a
mapping.

As an FYI, ATU entries can match PCIe transactions either:
a) Any transaction received on a particular BAR.
b) Any transaction received within a single contiguous window of PCIe
address space. This kind of mapping entry obviously has to be set up
after device enumeration is complete so that it can match the correct
PCIe address.

Each ATU entry maps a single contiguous set of PCIe addresses to a
single contiguous set of IOVAs which are passed to the IOMMU.
Transactions can pass through the ATU without being translated if
desired.

3) The transaction is passed to the IOMMU, which can again re-write
the address that the transaction accesses.

4) The transaction is passed to the memory controller and reads/writes DRAM.

In general, we want to be able to expose a large and dynamic set of
data buffers to the PCIe bus; certainly /far/ more than two separate
buffers (the number of ATU table entries). With current Linux APIs,
these buffers will not be located in contiguous or adjacent physical
(DRAM) or virtual (IOVA) addresses, nor in any particular window of
physical or IOVA addresses. However, the ATU's mapping from PCIe to
IOVA can only expose one or two contiguous ranges of IOVA space. These
two sets of requirements are at odds!

So, I'd like to propose some new APIs that the PCIe endpoint driver can use:

1) Allocate/reserve an IOVA range of specified size, but don't map
anything into the IOVA range.

I had done some work on this in the past, those patches were tested on Broadcom HW.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/16/23,
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/16/21,
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/16/19

I could not pursue it further, since I do not have the same HW to test it. Although now in Qualcomm SOC, we do use Synopsis Designware PCIe controller
but we dont restrict inbound addresses range for our SOC.

of course these patches can easily be ported, and extended.
they basically reserve IOVA ranges based on inbound dma-ranges DT property.

Regards,
Oza.


2) De-allocate the IOVA range allocated in (1).

3) Map a specific set (scatter-gather list I suppose) of
already-allocated/extant physical addresses into part of an IOVA range
allocated in (1).

4) Unmap a portion of an IOVA range that was mapped by (3).

One final note:

The memory controller can translate accesses to a small region of DRAM
address space into accesses to an interrupt generation module. This
allows devices attached to the PCIe bus to generate interrupts to
software running on the system with the PCIe endpoint controller. Thus
I deliberately described API 3 above as mapping a specific physical
address into IOVA space, as opposed to mapping an existing DRAM
allocation into IOVA space, in order to allow mapping this interrupt
generation address space into IOVA space. If we needed separate APIs
to map physical addresses vs. DRAM allocations into IOVA space, that
would likely be fine too.

Does this API proposal sound reasonable?

I have heard from some NVIDIA developers that the above APIs rather go
against the principle that individual drivers should not be aware of
the presence/absence of an IOMMU, and hence direct management of IOVA
allocation/layout is deliberately avoided, and hence there hasn't been
a need/desire for this kind of API in the past. However, I think our
current hardware design and use-case rather requires it. Do you agree?



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