Re: Ignore disabled ROM resources at setup

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 11:59 -0700, Linux Kernel Mailing List wrote:
> tree d8b7aaaec93de93841b46e8e05a3b454d05bd357
> parent 26aad69e3dd854abe9028ca873fb40b410a39dd7
> author Linus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org> Sat, 27 Aug 2005 00:49:22 -0700
> committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org> Sat, 27 Aug 2005 00:49:22 -0700
> 
> Ignore disabled ROM resources at setup
> 
> Writing even a disabled value seems to mess up some matrox graphics
> cards.  It may be a card-related issue, but we may also be writing
> reserved low bits in the result.
> 
> This was a fall-out of switching x86 over to the generic PCI resource
> allocation code, and needs more debugging.  In particular, the old x86
> code defaulted to not doing any resource allocations at all for ROM
> resources.
> 
> In the meantime, this has been reported to make X happier by Helge
> Hafting <helgehaf@aitel.hist.no>.

This "fix" also seems to break all powermac laptops around :( In fact,
it might break any user of pci_map_rom() as it exposes a bug in that
function.

The problem is that their firmware doesn't assign a ROM resource as they
have no ROM on the video chip (like most laptops). radeonfb and aty128fb
among others will call pci_map_rom() to try to find an x86 BIOS ROM with
some config tables in it.

pci_map_rom "sees" that the resource is unassigned by testing the parent
pointer, and calls pci_assign_resource() which, with this new patch,
will do nothing.

Unfortunately, pci_map_rom will not notice this failure, and will
happily ioremap & access the bogus resource, thus causing the crash.
I'll come up with a fix for pci_map_rom later today.

While looking there, I also noticed pci_map_rom_copy() stuff and I'm
surprised it was ever accepted in the tree. While I can understand that
we might need to keep a cached copy of the ROM content (due to cards
like matrox who can't enable both the ROM and the BARs among other
issues), the whole idea of whacking a kernel virtual pointer in the
struct resource->start of the ROM bar is just too disgusting for words
and will probably cause "intersting" side effects in /proc, sysfs and
others... Shouldn't we just have a pointer in pci_dev for the optional
"ROM cache" instead ?

Ben.


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