dmaengine: bcm2835: Fix interrupt race on RT
If IRQ handlers are threaded (either because CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT_BASE is enabled or "threadirqs" was passed on the command line) and if system load is sufficiently high that wakeup latency of IRQ threads degrades, SPI DMA transactions on the BCM2835 occasionally break like this: ks8851 spi0.0: SPI transfer timed out bcm2835-dma 3f007000.dma: DMA transfer could not be terminated ks8851 spi0.0 eth2: ks8851_rdfifo: spi_sync() failed The root cause is an assumption made by the DMA driver which is documented in a code comment in bcm2835_dma_terminate_all(): /* * Stop DMA activity: we assume the callback will not be called * after bcm_dma_abort() returns (even if it does, it will see * c->desc is NULL and exit.) */ That assumption falls apart if the IRQ handler bcm2835_dma_callback() is threaded: A client may terminate a descriptor and issue a new one before the IRQ handler had a chance to run. In fact the IRQ handler may miss an *arbitrary* number of descriptors. The result is the following race condition: 1. A descriptor finishes, its interrupt is deferred to the IRQ thread. 2. A client calls dma_terminate_async() which sets channel->desc = NULL. 3. The client issues a new descriptor. Because channel->desc is NULL, bcm2835_dma_issue_pending() immediately starts the descriptor. 4. Finally the IRQ thread runs and writes BCM2835_DMA_INT to the CS register to acknowledge the interrupt. This clears the ACTIVE flag, so the newly issued descriptor is paused in the middle of the transaction. Because channel->desc is not NULL, the IRQ thread finalizes the descriptor and tries to start the next one. I see two possible solutions: The first is to call synchronize_irq() in bcm2835_dma_issue_pending() to wait until the IRQ thread has finished before issuing a new descriptor. The downside of this approach is unnecessary latency if clients desire rapidly terminating and re-issuing descriptors and don't have any use for an IRQ callback. (The SPI TX DMA channel is a case in point.) A better alternative is to make the IRQ thread recognize that it has missed descriptors and avoid finalizing the newly issued descriptor. So first of all, set the ACTIVE flag when acknowledging the interrupt. This keeps a newly issued descriptor running. If the descriptor was finished, the channel remains idle despite the ACTIVE flag being set. However the ACTIVE flag can then no longer be used to check whether the channel is idle, so instead check whether the register containing the current control block address is zero and finalize the current descriptor only if so. That way, there is no impact on latency and throughput if the client doesn't care for the interrupt: Only minimal additional overhead is introduced for non-cyclic descriptors as one further MMIO read is necessary per interrupt to check for idleness of the channel. Cyclic descriptors are sped up slightly by removing one MMIO write per interrupt. Fixes: 96286b57 ("dmaengine: Add support for BCM2835") Signed-off-by: Lukas Wunner <lukas@wunner.de> Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v3.14+ Cc: Frank Pavlic <f.pavlic@kunbus.de> Cc: Martin Sperl <kernel@martin.sperl.org> Cc: Florian Meier <florian.meier@koalo.de> Cc: Clive Messer <clive.m.messer@gmail.com> Cc: Matthias Reichl <hias@horus.com> Tested-by: Stefan Wahren <stefan.wahren@i2se.com> Acked-by: Florian Kauer <florian.kauer@koalo.de> Signed-off-by: Vinod Koul <vkoul@kernel.org>
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