On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 10:59:47AM -0400, Alan Stern wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Apr 2010, Daniel Mack wrote:
> > Depending on the condition of the memory management, things might work
> > or not, and especially right after a reboot, there's a better chance to
> > get lower memory.
> >
> > The fix is to use usb_buffer_alloc() for that purpose which ensures
> > memory that is suitable for DMA. And on x86_64, this also means that the
> > upper 32 bits of the address returned are all 0's.
>
> That is not a good fix. usb_buffer_alloc() provides coherent memory,
> which is not what we want. I believe the correct fix is to specify the
> GFP_DMA32 flag in the kzalloc() call.
>
> Of course, some EHCI hardware _is_ capable of using 64-bit addresses.
> But not all, and other controller types aren't. In principle we could
> create a new allocation routine, which would take a pointer to the USB
> bus as an additional argument and use it to decide whether the memory
> needs to lie below 4 GB. I'm not sure adding this extra complexity
> would be worthwhile.
Well, I thought this is exactly what the usb_buffer_alloc() abstraction
functions are there for. We already pass a pointer to a struct
usb_device, so the routine knows which host controller it operates on.
So we can safely dispatch all the magic inside this function, no?
If not, I would rather introduce a new function than adding GFP_ flags
to all existing drivers.
I vote for a clean solution, a fixup of existing implementations and
a clear note about how to allocate buffers for USB drivers. I believe
faulty allocations of this kind can explain quite a lot of problems on
x86_64 machines.
> > If what I've stated is true, there are quite some more drivers affected
> > by this issue.
>
> Practically every USB driver, I should think. And maybe a lot of
> non-USB drivers too.
I found many such problems in drivers/media/{dvb,video},
drivers/usb/serial, sound/usb and even in the USB core. If we agree on
how to fix that nicely, I can take some of them.
Daniel
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