For devices stuck behind a conventional PCI bus, saving extra cycles at
33MHz is probably fairly significant. However since native PCI Express
is now the norm for high-performance devices, the optimisation to always
prefer 32-bit addresses for the sake of avoiding DAC is starting to look
rather anachronistic. Technically 32-bit addresses do have shorter TLPs
on PCIe, but unless the device is saturating its link bandwidth with
small transfers it seems unlikely that the difference is appreciable.

What definitely is appreciable, however, is that the IOVA allocator
doesn't behave all that well once the 32-bit space starts getting full.
As DMA working sets get bigger, this optimisation increasingly backfires
and adds considerable overhead to the dma_map path for use-cases like
high-bandwidth networking. We've increasingly bandaged the allocator
in attempts to mitigate this, but it remains fundamentally at odds with
other valid requirements to try as hard as possible to satisfy a request
within the given limit; what we really need is to just avoid this odd
notion of a speculative allocation when it isn't beneficial anyway.

Unfortunately that's where things get awkward... Having been present on
x86 for 15 years or so now, it turns out there are systems which fail to
properly define the upper limit of usable IOVA space for certain devices
and this trick was the only thing letting them work OK. I had a similar
ulterior motive for a couple of early arm64 systems when originally
adding it to iommu-dma, but those really should be fixed with proper
firmware bindings by now. Let's be brave and default it to off in the
hope that CI systems and developers will find and fix those bugs, but
expect that desktop-focused distro configs are likely to want to turn
it back on for maximum compatibility.
Signed-off-by: Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: John Garry <john.garry@huawei.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/3f06994f9f370f9d35b2630ab75171ecd2065621.1654782107.git.robin.murphy@arm.comSigned-off-by: Joerg Roedel <jroedel@suse.de>