[alsa-devel] USB transfer_buffer allocations on 64bit systems

[Alan Stern]

On Wed, 7 Apr 2010, Daniel Mack wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I was pointed to https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15580 by
> Pedro Ribeiro, and unfortunately I'm pretty late in the game. I wasn't
> aware of that thread until yesterday.
> 
> While the report is quite confusing, the reason seams pretty clear to me
> as I've been thru quite some time-demanding debugging of a very similar
> issue on Mac OS X. But I'm not totally sure whether we really hit the
> same issue here, so I'd like to have your opinions first.
> 
> The problem is appearantly the way the transfer buffer is allocated in
> the drivers. In the snd-usb-caiaq driver, I used kzalloc() to get memory
> which works fine on 32bit systems. On x86_64, however, it seems that
> kzalloc() hands out memory beyond the 32bit addressable boundary, which
> the DMA controller of the 32bit PCI-connected EHCI controller is unable
> to write to or read from. Am I correct on this conclusion?

That seems like the right answer.  You are correct that an EHCI 
controller capable only of 32-bit memory accesses would not be able to 
use a buffer above the 4 GB line.

> Depending on the condition of the memory management, things might work
> or not, and especially right after a reboot, there's a better chance to
> get lower memory.
> 
> The fix is to use usb_buffer_alloc() for that purpose which ensures
> memory that is suitable for DMA. And on x86_64, this also means that the
> upper 32 bits of the address returned are all 0's.

That is not a good fix.  usb_buffer_alloc() provides coherent memory, 
which is not what we want.  I believe the correct fix is to specify the 
GFP_DMA32 flag in the kzalloc() call.

Of course, some EHCI hardware _is_ capable of using 64-bit addresses.  
But not all, and other controller types aren't.  In principle we could
create a new allocation routine, which would take a pointer to the USB
bus as an additional argument and use it to decide whether the memory 
needs to lie below 4 GB.  I'm not sure adding this extra complexity 
would be worthwhile.

> If what I've stated is true, there are quite some more drivers affected
> by this issue.

Practically every USB driver, I should think.  And maybe a lot of 
non-USB drivers too.

> I collected a list of places where similar fixes are
> needed, and I can send patches if I get a thumbs-up.
> 
> Pedro is currently testing a patch I sent out yesterday.

Good work -- it certainly would have taken me a long time to figure 
this out.

Alan Stern