[PATCH] nvme: Fix cache alignment

[Bin Meng]

On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 5:04 PM Marek Vasut <marek.vasut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/2/21 9:54 AM, Bin Meng wrote:
> [...]
> >>>> cache aligned in memory, however the cache operations are called on
> >>>> the structure sizes, which themselves might not be cache aligned. Add
> >>>> the necessary rounding to fix this, which permits the nvme to work on
> >>>> arm64.
> >>>
> >>> +ARM guys
> >>>
> >>> Which ARM64 SoC did you test this with?
> >>
> >> RCar3, although that's irrelevant, the problem will happen on any arm or
> >> arm64, and possibly any other system which needs cache management.
> >
> > There was a recent change to nvme.c that fixed a cache issue on ARMv8
> > so I thought this might be platform related.
>
> I used master, so unlikely.

It's strange this issue was not exposed last time when this driver was
tested on ARMv8.

>
> >>> The round down in this patch should be unnecessary.
> >>
> >> Can you explain why ?
> >
> > I just took a further look and most of the start address should be
> > cache line aligned (4KiB aligned) except the
> > nvme_read_completion_status(). It's only 16 bytes aligned which might
> > not be cache line aligned.
>
> Right, there are various arm chips with 32B/64B alignment requirements.
>
> >>> But it's better to
> >>> figure out which call to dcache_xxx() with an unaligned end address.
> >>
> >> If you look at the code, most of them can (and do) trigger this,
> >> therefore they need such alignment, as explained in the commit message.
> >
> > Now I wonder what's the correct implementation of the
> > invalidate_dcache_range() and flush_dcache_range() in U-Boot?
> > Shouldn't the round down/up happen in these APIs instead of doing such
> > in drivers?
>
> Definitely not, because then the rounding might flush/invalidate cache
> over areas where this could cause a problem (e.g. neighboring DMA
> descriptors). The driver must do the cache management correctly.

Well we can implement in these APIs and document its expected usage.
Either way a driver has to do the cache management correctly. Not
doing it in the driver eliminates some duplications of rounding
up/down.

For this case, I believe we just need to take care of
nvme_read_completion_status().

Regards,
Bin