linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/2] acpi, apei: use appropriate pgprot

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Date:	Thu, 13 Aug 2015 12:14:22 +0100
From:	Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>
To:	Matt Fleming <matt@...eblueprint.co.uk>
Cc:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	"Jonathan (Zhixiong) Zhang" <zjzhang@...eaurora.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-efi@...r.kernel.org" <linux-efi@...r.kernel.org>,
	Matt Fleming <matt.fleming@...el.com>,
	Borislav Petkov <bp@...e.de>,
	Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@...aro.org>,
	Catalin Marinas <Catalin.Marinas@....com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] acpi, apei: use appropriate pgprot_t to map GHES
 memory

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 10:24:32AM +0100, Matt Fleming wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Aug, at 10:19:17AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > * Matt Fleming <matt@...eblueprint.co.uk> wrote:
> > 
> > > From: "Jonathan (Zhixiong) Zhang" <zjzhang@...eaurora.org>
> > > 
> > > With ACPI APEI firmware first handling, generic hardware error
> > > record is updated by firmware in GHES memory region. On an arm64
> > > platform, firmware updates GHES memory region with uncached
> > > access attribute, and then Linux reads stale data from cache.
> > 
> > So this paragraph does not parse for me ...
> > 
> > If it tries to explain a bug it falls very short of doing a proper job of that.
> 
> I'll let Jonathan provide more details but I understood the problem to
> be a cache (in)coherency issue.
> 
> The kernel currently maps the the GHES memory region as cacheable
> (PAGE_KERNEL) for all architectures. This memory region is used as a
> communication buffer for reporting hardware errors from the firmware to
> kernel. Essentially the firmware writes hardware error records there,
> trigger an NMI/interrupt, and the GHES driver goes off and grabs the
> error record from the GHES region.
> 
> Since the firmware gets first crack at inspecting the error this
> mechanism is referred to as "firmware first" in the ACPI spec.
> 
> Now, there's a mismatch on arm64 platforms between how the kernel maps
> the GHES region (PAGE_KERNEL) and how the firmware maps it
> (EFI_MEMORY_UC, i.e. uncacheable), leading to the possibility of the
> kernel GHES driver reading stale data from the cache when it receives
> the NMI/interrupt.
> 
> As for exactly why the arm64 firmware uses an uncached mapping, I
> presume it's to avoid relying on the kernel to get the necessary cache
> flushing correct.
> 
> The proposed solution is to query the EFI memory map to ensure the
> kernel uses a compatible mapping.
> 
> None of this should affect x86, it still uses PAGE_KERNEL because we're
> yet to see any hardware that has an EFI memory map entry for the GHES
> region that's incompatible with PAGE_KERNEL.
> 
> Jonathan, would you like to provide more details?

FWIW, that matches my understanding of the problem too. The ARM architecture
refers to this situation as "mismatched memory attributes" and typically
requires some explicit cache maintenance to achieve portable behaviour in
this scenario.

It's much better to avoid the mismatch in the first place, if you can,
which is what this is all about.

Will
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