Re: [Qemu-devel] SPARC iommu mapping

[Joerg Platte]

Am Mittwoch, 5. April 2006 19:36 schrieb Blue Swirl:
Hi!

> I don't have any better documentation either, I just coded against what
> Proll and Linux expect. But the theory of operation is simple. Much like

OK, I thought I was just too stupid to find good documentation :-)

> how the MMU translates CPU's virtual addresses to physical addresses for
> memory, IOMMU translates device virtual memory accesses to physical
> addresses. The VA to PA entries are found in a simple page table.

That's what I read from qemu's iommu functions.

> In the case of not finding a valid translation entry, IOMMU can't fault the
> device like normal MMU can easily fault the CPU. I don't know what should
> happen then, probably put the address to AFAR register and raise some
> interrupt, while the device (for example Ethernet controller) waiting for
> the data suffers in limbo. I think it would be strange for an OS to rely on
> this, so I guess it's a bug somewhere else. My guess for the valid bit is
> that it's used in a real IOMMU to select the entries that will be loaded to
> its internal translation buffer.

Maybe. 

> The DMA controllers for both ESP and Lance are within the same page. This
> means that in Qemu, DMA controller register accesses for either of them go
> to just one of these. It just happens to work, but maybe this causes the
> problem. You could try to confirm this by enabling also DEBUG_LANCE and see
> if there is troublesome activity in the Lance direction near the bad
> accesses.

Hmmm, I don't use the network. Just disk access. But I'll check this.

> Can you provide a test case so that I could try it as well?

I'm using the two attached programs. writetest is used inside qemu to directly 
write to /dev/sda (with "writetest /dev/sda"). readtest can then be used 
outside qemu to check the written data ("readtest imagefile"). 

Additionally, I logged the translated virtual address as mentioned in my first 
mail. The kernel is 2.6.13. 

regards,
Jörg

readtest.c
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writetest.c
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