linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] scatterlist: enable sg chaining for all architectures

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Date:	Thu, 30 Apr 2015 00:59:42 -0700
From:	"Nicholas A. Bellinger" <nab@...ux-iscsi.org>
To:	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...senPartnership.com>
Cc:	Akinobu Mita <akinobu.mita@...il.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>, linux-arch@...r.kernel.org,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>,
	"linux-scsi@...r.kernel.org" <linux-scsi@...r.kernel.org>,
	target-devel@...r.kernel.org,
	Parisc List <linux-parisc@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] scatterlist: enable sg chaining for all architectures

On Tue, 2015-04-28 at 19:15 -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-04-29 at 09:34 +0900, Akinobu Mita wrote:
> > 2015-04-29 7:16 GMT+09:00 James Bottomley
> > <James.Bottomley@...senpartnership.com>:
> > > On Tue, 2015-04-28 at 14:27 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > >> On Sat, 25 Apr 2015 23:56:16 +0900 Akinobu Mita <akinobu.mita@...il.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> > Some architectures enable sg chaining option while others do not.
> > >> >
> > >> > The requirement to enable sg chaining is that pages must be aligned
> > >> > at a 32-bit boundary in order to overload the LSB of the pointer.
> > >> > Regardless of whether ARCH_HAS_SG_CHAIN is defined or not, the above
> > >> > requirement is always chacked by BUG_ON() in sg_assign_page.  So
> > >> > all architectures can enable sg chaining.
> > >> >
> > >> > As you can see from the changes in drivers/target/target_core_rd.c,
> > >> > enabling SG chaining for all architectures allows us to allocate
> > >> > discontiguous scatterlist tables which can be traversed throughout
> > >> > by sg_next() without a special handling for some architectures.
> > >>
> > >> Thanks, I'll grab this.  If anyone has concerns, speak now or hold both
> > >> pieces!
> > >
> > > It breaks a host of architectures doesn't it?  I can specifically speak
> > > for PARISC:  The problem is the way our iommus are consuming
> > > scatterlists.  They're assuming we can dereference the scatterlist as an
> > > array (like this code in ccio-dma.c):
> > >
> > > static int
> > > ccio_map_sg(struct device *dev, struct scatterlist *sglist, int nents,
> > >             enum dma_data_direction direction)
> > > [...]
> > >         for(i = 0; i < nents; i++)
> > >                 prev_len += sglist[i].length;
> > >
> > > If you turn on sg chaining on our architecture, we'll run off the end of
> > > that array dereference and crash.
> > >
> > > This can all be fixed by making our architecture dma mapping code use
> > > iterators instead of array lists, but that needs more code than this
> > > patch provides.  I assume there are similar issues on a lot of other
> > > architectures, so before you can contemplate a patch like this, surely
> > > all the architecture consumers have to be converted to iterator instead
> > > of array format?
> > >
> > > The first place to start would be a survey of who's still using the
> > > array format.
> > 
> > Agreed.  I could find similar issues in arch/m68k/kernel/dma.c.
> > (git grep '[^a-z]sg++' shows that there are a lot of similar issues)
> 
> OK, so the original idea of the chained SG lists was that most of the
> older architectures have fixed length lists for their IOMMUs, or simply
> wouldn't see a benefit with IO lengths > 0.5MB (which was the default
> before chaining) so there wasn't much point converting them to chaining
> if they wouldn't see any benefit from it.
> 
> ARCH_HAS_SG_CHAIN is supposed to be completely transparent to all driver
> side consumers, so there was never thought to be much point removing it.
> It looks like there's some sort of cockup going on in the target driver
> but otherwise, your removal patch is pretty empty, confirming this.
> 
> Perhaps the best thing to do is just fix target and call it quits?
> 

So the ARCH_HAS_SG_CHAIN usage in target_core_rd.c was recently added so
target DIF emulation could use standard SGL iterators and correctly
handle boundaries across T10-PI metadata SGL tables in the ramdisk
backend.

The SGLs in question are never actually mapped to a HW IOMMU, and
Akinobu's current changes in mainline do support both arch cases and
make common sbc_dif_copy_prot() code a bit simpler too.

That said, I'd rather to keep the hack around for now so that both
ARCH_HAS_SG_CHAIN types can still work, short of a full arch conversion
of course..

Thanks,

--nab

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