Re: [PATCH] dma-debug: Check for drivers mapping vmalloc addresses

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Fri Sep 21 2018 - 01:25:40 EST


On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 03:35:59PM -0700, Stephen Boyd wrote:
> I recently debugged a DMA mapping oops where a driver was trying to map
> a buffer returned from request_firmware() with dma_map_single(). Memory
> returned from request_firmware() is mapped into the vmalloc region and
> this isn't a valid region to map with dma_map_single() per the DMA
> documentation's "What memory is DMA'able?" section.
>
> Unfortunately, we don't really check that in the DMA debugging code, so
> enabling DMA debugging doesn't help catch this problem. Let's add a new
> DMA debug function to check for a vmalloc address and print a warning if
> this happens. This makes it a little easier to debug these sorts of
> problems, instead of seeing odd behavior or crashes when drivers attempt
> to map the vmalloc space for DMA.

This looks sensible to me. I wonder if we shouldn't just throw in
an unconditional

WARN_ON_ONCE(is_vmalloc_addr(ptr)));

into dma_map_single_attrs, though.