Subject: Re: [Intel-wired-lan] [PATCH] pci: Use a bus-global mutex to protect VPD operations

From: Alexander Duyck <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 May 2015 17:07:05 -0700

On 05/19/2015 04:01 PM, Jesse Brandeburg wrote:
> On Tue, 19 May 2015 10:55:03 -0700
> Alexander Duyck <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> On 05/18/2015 05:00 PM, Mark D Rustad wrote:
>>> Some devices have a problem with concurrent VPD access to different
>>> functions of the same physical device, so move the protecting mutex
>>> from the pci_vpd structure to the pci_bus structure. There are a
>>> number of reports on support sites for a variety of devices from
>>> various vendors getting the "vpd r/w failed" message. This is likely
>>> to at least fix some of them. Thanks to Shannon Nelson for helping
>>> to come up with this approach.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Mark Rustad <[email-masked]>
>>> Acked-by: Shannon Nelson <[email-masked]>
>>> Acked-by: Jeff Kirsher <[email-masked]>
>> Instead of moving the mutex lock around you would be much better served
>> by simply removing the duplicate VPD entries for a given device in a
>> PCIe quirk.  Then you can save yourself the extra pain and effort of
>> having to deal with serialized VPD accesses for a multifunction device.
>>
>> The logic for the quirk should be fairly simple.
>>     1.  Scan for any other devices with VPD that share the same bus and
>> device number.
>>     2.  If bdf is equal to us keep searching.
>>     3.  If bdf is less than our bdf we release our VPD area and set VPD
>> pointer to NULL.
> But Alex if you do this you're violating the principle of least
> surprise, not to mention changing a user-space interface which should
> not be done.

I'm willing to back off on dropping the VPD info for those functions 
entirely, but the lock should not be pushed to the bus.

> Mark's solution is pretty graceful and solves the issue at heart, which
> is that
> 1) several Intel chips have this issue
> 2) it appears that several other vendor's chips have this issue (or
> similar) as well, but even if they don't Mark's fix will not change
> their general operation, only make a small serializing effect when
> multiple simultaneous reads are made.

2 is based on a false premise.  The "vpd r/w failed" error is about as 
common as dev_watchdog().  Just because it presents with a similar 
symptom doesn't mean it is the same issue.

> This is a reasonably small fix, with a small kernel footprint, which
> does not require changing user expectations or violating user-space
> semantics that are already established, so I support it as is.

I am not against the shared lock approach, but the bus is the wrong 
place for this.  Sharing a bus does not mean that the devices are all a 
part of the same chip, it only means they share a bus.  I would guess 
that this fix has not been tested with any LOM parts such as e1000e, or 
in a virtualization environment, as this would exhibit different 
behavior with this patch.  For example does it make sense for an e1000e 
LOM to be joined at the hip with a SATA or USB controller.  They could 
all be from different manufacturers with different requirements.

If the bug is in Intel Ethernet with VPD then I would suggest tweaking 
the VPD logic and adding a Intel Ethernet PCI quirk.  It doesn't make 
sense to assume based on one common error message that all of creation 
has the same issue.

If anything I believe Mark's patches have revealed a bigger issue. That 
is the fact that the sysfs file is reading outside of the VPD area which 
the PCI spec doesn't have a defined behavior for.  I suspect this is the 
cause of a number of the issues being reported as Broadcom had to 
specifically quirk to prevent it, and I found one discussion that 
indicated something similar might be needed for Realtek.

- Alex