Re: [PATCH] ipr: don't doublefree pages from scatterlist

[Brian King <brking@us.ibm.com>]

David S. Miller wrote:
> From: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
> Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 09:32:54 +0000 (GMT)
> 
>> From looking at the source, the architectures I found to be doing
>> scatterlist coalescing in some cases were alpha, ia64, parisc (some
>> code under drivers), powerpc, sparc64 and x86_64.
>>
>> I agree with you that it would be possible for them to do the coalescing
>> by just adjusting dma_address and dma_length (though it's architecture-
>> dependent whether there are such fields at all), not interfering with
>> the input page and length; and maybe some of them do proceed that way.
>> I didn't find the coalescing code in any of them very easy to follow.
>>
>> So please examine arch/x86_64/kernel/pci_gart.c gart_map_sg (and
>> dma_map_cont which it calls): x86_64 was the architecture on which
>> the problem was really found with drivers/scsi/st.c, and avoided
>> by that boot option iommu=nomerge.
>>
>> Lines like "*sout = *s;" and "*sout = sg[start];" are structure-
>> copying whole scallerlist entries from one position in the list
>> to another, without explicit mention of the page and length fields.
> 
> That's a bug, frankly.  Sparc64 doesn't need to do anything like
> that.  Spamming the page pointers is really really bogus and I'm
> surprised this doesn't make more stuff explode.
> 
> It was never the intention to allow the DMA mapping support code
> to modify the page, offset, and length members of the scatterlist.
> Only the DMA components.
> 
> I'd really prefer that those assignments get fixed and an explicit
> note added to Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt about this.

How about this for a documentation fix?

Brian


-- 
Brian King
eServer Storage I/O
IBM Linux Technology Center

The current pci_map_sg API is a bit unclear what it is allowed
to modify in the passed scatterlist when coalescing entries.
Clarify the pci_map_sg API to prevent it from modifying
the page, offset, and length fields in the scatterlist.

Signed-off-by: Brian King <brking@us.ibm.com>
---

 linux-2.6-bjking1/Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt |    5 ++++-
 1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff -puN Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt~dma_mapping_clarification Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt
--- linux-2.6/Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt~dma_mapping_clarification	2006-02-06 08:23:10.000000000 -0600
+++ linux-2.6-bjking1/Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt	2006-02-06 08:38:43.000000000 -0600
@@ -513,7 +513,10 @@ consecutive sglist entries can be merged
 ends and the second one starts on a page boundary - in fact this is a huge
 advantage for cards which either cannot do scatter-gather or have very
 limited number of scatter-gather entries) and returns the actual number
-of sg entries it mapped them to. On failure 0 is returned.
+of sg entries it mapped them to. The implementation is free to do this
+by modifying the scatterlist fields specified for DMA. The scatterlist
+fields used as an input to this function (i.e. page, offset, and length)
+will NOT be modified. On failure 0 is returned.
 
 Then you should loop count times (note: this can be less than nents times)
 and use sg_dma_address() and sg_dma_len() macros where you previously
_