On 20.05.2022 10:30, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
On 5/20/2022 2:59 AM, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
On 5/20/2022 2:05 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 20.05.2022 06:43, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
On 5/4/22 5:14 AM, Juergen Gross wrote:
On 04.05.22 10:31, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 03.05.2022 15:22, Juergen Gross wrote:
... these uses there are several more. You say nothing on why those want leaving unaltered. When preparing my earlier patch I did inspect them and came to the conclusion that these all would also better observe the adjusted behavior (or else I couldn't have left pat_enabled() as the only predicate). In fact, as said in the description of my earlier patch, in my debugging I did find the use in i915_gem_object_pin_map() to be the problematic one, which you leave alone.
Oh, I missed that one, sorry.
That is why your patch would not fix my Haswell unless it also touches i915_gem_object_pin_map() in drivers/gpu/drm/i915/gem/i915_gem_pages.c
I wanted to be rather defensive in my changes, but I agree at least the case in arch_phys_wc_add() might want to be changed, too.
I think your approach needs to be more aggressive so it will fix all the known false negatives introduced by bdd8b6c98239 such as the one in i915_gem_object_pin_map().
I looked at Jan's approach and I think it would fix the issue with my Haswell as long as I don't use the nopat option. I really don't have a strong opinion on that question, but I think the nopat option as a Linux kernel option, as opposed to a hypervisor option, should only affect the kernel, and if the hypervisor provides the pat feature, then the kernel should not override that,
Hmm, why would the kernel not be allowed to override that? Such an override would affect only the single domain where the kernel runs; other domains could take their own decisions.
Also, for the sake of completeness: "nopat" used when running on bare metal has the same bad effect on system boot, so there pretty clearly is an error cleanup issue in the i915 driver. But that's orthogonal, and I expect the maintainers may not even care (but tell us "don't do that then").
Actually I just did a test with the last official Debian kernel build of Linux 5.16, that is, a kernel before bdd8b6c98239 was applied. In fact, the nopat option does *not* break the i915 driver in 5.16. That is, with the nopat option, the i915 driver loads normally on both the bare metal and on the Xen hypervisor. That means your presumption (and the presumption of the author of bdd8b6c98239) that the "nopat" option was being observed by the i915 driver is incorrect. Setting "nopat" had no effect on my system with Linux 5.16. So after doing these tests, I am against the aggressive approach of breaking the i915 driver with the "nopat" option because prior to bdd8b6c98239, nopat did not break the i915 driver. Why break it now?
Because that's, in my understanding, is the purpose of "nopat" (not breaking the driver of course - that's a driver bug -, but having an effect on the driver).
Jan