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Re: [PATCH v1 03/14] xen/riscv: introduce ioremap()




On 4/22/25 11:14 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 22.04.2025 10:40, Oleksii Kurochko wrote:
On 4/17/25 4:49 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 17.04.2025 16:37, Oleksii Kurochko wrote:
On 4/17/25 4:24 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 17.04.2025 16:20, Oleksii Kurochko wrote:
On 4/15/25 1:02 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 15.04.2025 12:29, Oleksii Kurochko wrote:
On 4/10/25 5:13 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 08.04.2025 17:57, Oleksii Kurochko wrote:
Based on RISC-V unpriviliged spec ( Version 20240411 ):
```
For implementations that conform to the RISC-V Unix Platform Specification,
I/O devices and DMA operations are required to access memory coherently and
via strongly ordered I/O channels. Therefore, accesses to regular main memory
regions that are concurrently accessed by external devices can also use the
standard synchronization mechanisms. Implementations that do not conform
to the Unix Platform Specification and/or in which devices do not access
memory coherently will need to use mechanisms
(which are currently platform-specific or device-specific) to enforce
coherency.

I/O regions in the address space should be considered non-cacheable
regions in the PMAs for those regions. Such regions can be considered coherent
by the PMA if they are not cached by any agent.
```
and [1]:
```
The current riscv linux implementation requires SOC system to support
memory coherence between all I/O devices and CPUs. But some SOC systems
cannot maintain the coherence and they need support cache clean/invalid
operations to synchronize data.

Current implementation is no problem with SiFive FU540, because FU540
keeps all IO devices and DMA master devices coherence with CPU. But to a
traditional SOC vendor, it may already have a stable non-coherency SOC
system, the need is simply to replace the CPU with RV CPU and rebuild
the whole system with IO-coherency is very expensive.
```

and the fact that all known ( to me ) CPUs that support the H-extension
and that ones is going to be supported by Xen have memory coherency
between all I/O devices and CPUs, so it is currently safe to use the
PAGE_HYPERVISOR attribute.
However, in cases where a platform does not support memory coherency, it
should support CMO extensions and Svpbmt. In this scenario, updates to
ioremap will be necessary.
For now, a compilation error will be generated to ensure that the need to
update ioremap() is not overlooked.

[1]https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-riscv/patch/1555947870-23014-1-git-send-email-guoren@xxxxxxxxxx/
But MMIO access correctness isn't just a matter of coherency. There may not
be any caching involved in most cases, or else you may observe significantly
delayed or even dropped (folded with later ones) writes, and reads may be
serviced from the cache instead of going to actual MMIO. Therefore ...

--- a/xen/arch/riscv/Kconfig
+++ b/xen/arch/riscv/Kconfig
@@ -15,6 +15,18 @@ config ARCH_DEFCONFIG
     	string
     	default "arch/riscv/configs/tiny64_defconfig"
     
+config HAS_SVPBMT
+	bool
+	help
+	  This config enables usage of Svpbmt ISA-extension ( Supervisor-mode:
+	  page-based memory types).
+
+	  The memory type for a page contains a combination of attributes
+	  that indicate the cacheability, idempotency, and ordering
+	  properties for access to that page.
+
+	  The Svpbmt extension is only available on 64-bit cpus.
... I kind of expect this extension (or anything else that there might be) will need
making use of.
In cases where the Svpbmt extension isn't available, PMA (Physical Memory Attributes)
is used to control which memory regions are cacheable, non-cacheable, readable, writable,
etc. PMA is configured in M-mode by the firmware (e.g., OpenSBI), as is done in Andes
cores, or it can be fixed at design time, as in SiFive cores.
How would things work if there was a need to map a RAM page uncacheable (via
ioremap() or otherwise)?
My understanding is that Svpbmt is only needed when someone wants to change the memory
attribute of a page set by PMA.

The question is if non-cacheable RAM page is really needed if we have a coherency?
Aiui coherency here is among CPUs.
```
For implementations that conform to the RISC-V Unix Platform Specification,
I/O devices and DMA operations are required to access memory coherently and
via strongly ordered I/O channels. Therefore, accesses to regular main memory
regions that are concurrently accessed by external devices can also use the
standard synchronization mechanisms. Implementations that do not conform
to the Unix Platform Specification and/or in which devices do not access
memory coherently will need to use mechanisms
(which are currently platform-specific or device-specific) to enforce
coherency.
```
Based on this from the spec, coherency here is not only among CPUs.


Properties of devices in the system are
largely unknown?
Yes, but still not sure what kind of property requires ioremap() which won't work
without Svpmbt. Could you please tell me an example?
Well, above you said they all need to access memory coherently. That's the
"property" I was referring to.
Do you mean that device could have a property which tell that it would like to have non-cachable
region used for that? I haven't seen such property in device tree files.

Do we have in Xen cases when Xen wants to have map part of RAM as non-cachebale and it is only the
one option?
On x86 we have the case that IOMMUs may access memory non-coherently. This is
particular means that IOMMU page table updates (which necessarily live in RAM)
need to be done quite carefully. As it's all our code, we deal with the
situation by issuing cache flushes, avoiding the need for UC mappings.

Graphics engines may have similar constraints, aiui. With the driver code not
being part of Xen, we wouldn't be able to use a similar "simplification" there.
UC mappings would be pretty much unavoidable.
For this case, it would be better to have Svpmbt.

I would like to noted that Svpmbt isn't supported by RV32 architectures. For such cases, it will be still
needed to play with PMA.
I found today a patch in Linux kernel which does something similar to what I wrote in one of my previous
replies:
  [0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20241102000843.1301099-1-samuel.holland@xxxxxxxxxx/
In the cover letter [0] it is mentioned the following:
  On some RISC-V platforms, including StarFive JH7100 and ESWIN EIC7700,
  RAM is mapped to multiple physical address ranges, with each alias
  having a different set of statically-determined Physical Memory
  Attributes (PMAs). Software selects the PMAs for a page by choosing a
  PFN from the corresponding physical address range. On these platforms,
  this is the only way to allocate noncached memory for use with
  noncoherent DMA.

So firmware should configure PMAs so some part of RAM is noncached and then kernel get this info based
on the binding:
  https://patchew.org/linux/20241102000843.1301099-1-samuel.holland@xxxxxxxxxx/20241102000843.1301099-2-samuel.holland@xxxxxxxxxx/

Considering that this feature isn't available even in Linux kernel, we can start with assumption that all
our SoCs will support Svpmbt.

We don't really care about StarFive JH7100 as it doesn't support H extension, but we potentially should care
about ESWIN EIC7700, which support H extension and doesn't support Svpmbt extension according to a datasheet
publicly available:
  Each EIC7700X core is configured to support the RV64I base ISA, as well as the Multiply (M), Atomic(A),
  Single-Precision Floating Point (F), Double-Precision Floating Point (D), Compressed (C), CSR
  Instructions (Zicsr), Instruction-Fetch Fence (Zifencei), Address Calculation (Zba), Basic Bit
  Manipulation (Zbb), and Count Overflow and Mode-Based Filtering (Sscofpmf) RISC‑V extensions. This
  is captured by the RISC‑V extension string: RV64GC_Zba_Zbb_Sscofpmf.


I am also thinking why it can't be used cachable region + barrier (if we don't have memory coherency
for everything).
Not sure what exactly you're asking here (if anything). An answer would very
likely depend on the specific kind of barrier you're thinking about. The
question would be what, if any, effect a barrier would have on the cache(s).
I confused barrier with cache flushes (when I wrote that I thought about the case of DMA that we don't really
should have requirement of non-cachable memory for DMA as it is enough to have memory fence between use of DMA
memory and MMIO that triggers the dma), basically I meant what you wrote above about x86's IOMMUs.

~ Oleksii

Anyway, if it isn't an option to have mapped cacheble region + barrier then there is no any choice
and the support of Svpmbt is required.
Quite possible.

Jan

 


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