Re: [RFC PATCH] arm64: mm: Add invalidate back in arch_sync_dma_for_device when FROM_DEVICE

From: Nanyong Sun
Date: Sat Nov 19 2022 - 22:00:15 EST


On 2022/11/17 16:24, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:

On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 at 07:33, Nanyong Sun <sunnanyong@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The commit c50f11c6196f ("arm64: mm: Don't invalidate FROM_DEVICE
buffers at start of DMA transfer") replaces invalidate with clean
when DMA_FROM_DEVICE, this changes the behavior of functions like
dma_map_single() and dma_sync_single_for_device(*, *, *, DMA_FROM_DEVICE),
then it may make some drivers works unwell because the implementation
of these DMA APIs lose the original cache invalidation.

Situation 1:
...
Situation 2:
After backporting the above commit, we find a network card driver go
wrong with cache inconsistency when doing DMA transfer: CPU got the
stale data in cache when reading DMA data received from device.
I suppose this means those drivers may lack dma_sync_single_for_cpu()
calls after the inbound transfers complete, and are instead relying on
the cache invalidation performed before the transfer to make the DMA'd
data visible to the CPU.

This is buggy and fragile, and should be fixed in any case. There is
no guarantee that the CPU will not preload parts of the buffer into
the cache while DMA is in progress, so the invalidation must occur
strictly after the device has finished transferring the data.

A similar phenomenon happens on sata disk drivers, it involves
mainline modules like libata, scsi, ahci etc, and is hard to find
out which line of code results in the error.

Could you identify the actual hardware and drivers that you are
observing the issue on? Claiming that everything is broken is not very
helpful in narrowing it down (although I am not saying you are wrong
:-))
The hardware combination is ARM64 with SATA disk,but not every product of
this combination has the DMA problem, and the related drivers seems right,
so I am currently checking whether the DT or ACPI indicate device's coherent attribute uncorrectly.
(The scenario that Robin proposed in another email:
===============================================================
It also commonly goes wrong the other way round when the drivers are correct but DT/ACPI failed to indicate a coherent device as such.
If writes from the device actually snoop, they hit the still-present cache line, which then gets invalidated by unmap/sync_for_cpu and the new data is lost.
Robin.
===============================================================
)
It seems that some dirvers may go wrong and have to match the
implementation changes of the DMA APIs, and it would be confused
because the behavior of these DMA APIs on arm64 are different
from other archs.

Add invalidate back in arch_sync_dma_for_device() to keep drivers
compatible by replace dcache_clean_poc with dcache_clean_inval_poc
when DMA_FROM_DEVICE.

So notably, the patch in question removes cache invalidation *without*
clean, and what you are adding here is clean+invalidate. (Invalidation
without clean may undo the effect of, e.g., the memzero() of a secret
in memory, and so it is important that we don't add that back if we
can avoid it)

Since we won't lose the benefits of that change, incorporating
invalidation at this point should be fine: clean+invalidate shouldn't
be more expensive than clean, and [correctly written] drivers will
invalidate those lines anyway, as the data has to come from DRAM in
any case.

So unless fixing the drivers in question is feasible, this change
seems reasonable to me.
Agree with you and I have some questions:
1. I am not very clear that how to fix the drivers? Before the patch in question, the behaviors of DMA APIs are like this:

                     map        for_cpu         for_device unmap
TO_DEV    writeback    none             writeback       none
TO_CPU    invalidate    invalidate*    invalidate       invalidate*
BIDIR        writeback    invalidate      writeback      invalidate

(Reference from: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20180518175004.GF17671@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/)

and now the behaviors on arm64 become this:

                     map              for_cpu for_device            unmap
TO_DEV    writeback          none writeback             none
TO_CPU   -> [writeback]    invalidate* ->[writeback]       invalidate*
BIDIR        writeback          invalidate writeback             invalidate

Can we confirm that these changes are acceptable on the ARM64?

I counted the drivers on the Linux mainline and there are at least 123 places of code have called
dma_sync_single_for_device(*, *, *, DMA_FROM_DEVICE), one of them like this:
drivers/net/ethernet/sun/cassini.c:
    cas_rx_process_pkt():
                dma_sync_single_for_cpu(&cp->pdev->dev, page->dma_addr + off,
                                        i, DMA_FROM_DEVICE);
                addr = cas_page_map(page->buffer);
                memcpy(p, addr + off, i);
                dma_sync_single_for_device(&cp->pdev->dev,
                                           page->dma_addr + off, i,
                                           DMA_FROM_DEVICE);

Are they correct?
- If they are, they may be affected by the implementation change, then how to fix them?
- Or these codes are needless on arm64 so they won't be affected?

2. Finding the drivers which do not strictly follow the DMA API rule is expensive, they used to run with no problem
because they called the DMA APIs that will do the same invalidate thing like dma_sync_single_for_cpu(), but now they have risks,
so every DMA users should check the drivers, including in tree, out-of-tree and binary-only drivers.
We also need to check the DTS and ACPI to prevent the case that Robin mentioned.
And are there any other scenarios we haven't thought of that need to be checked?

That will be a huge and difficult workload for DMA users, and based on they know the influence of that patch.

So, adding invalidate back in arch_sync_dma_for_device() seems more friendly, cheap and harmless,  the behaviors on arm64 will be this:

                     map              for_cpu for_device            unmap
TO_DEV    writeback          none writeback             none
TO_CPU    wback+inv        invalidate*        wback+inv invalidate*
BIDIR        writeback          invalidate writeback             invalidate
Fixes: c50f11c6196f ("arm64: mm: Don't invalidate FROM_DEVICE buffers at start of DMA transfer")
Signed-off-by: Nanyong Sun <sunnanyong@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
arch/arm64/mm/dma-mapping.c | 5 ++++-
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/mm/dma-mapping.c b/arch/arm64/mm/dma-mapping.c
index 3cb101e8cb29..07f6a3089c64 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/mm/dma-mapping.c
+++ b/arch/arm64/mm/dma-mapping.c
@@ -18,7 +18,10 @@ void arch_sync_dma_for_device(phys_addr_t paddr, size_t size,
{
unsigned long start = (unsigned long)phys_to_virt(paddr);

- dcache_clean_poc(start, start + size);
+ if (dir == DMA_FROM_DEVICE)
+ dcache_clean_inval_poc(start, start + size);
+ else
+ dcache_clean_poc(start, start + size);
}

void arch_sync_dma_for_cpu(phys_addr_t paddr, size_t size,
--
2.25.1

.