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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org>2005-04-16 15:20:36 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org>2005-04-16 15:20:36 -0700
commit1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 (patch)
tree0bba044c4ce775e45a88a51686b5d9f90697ea9d /Documentation/DocBook/deviceiobook.tmpl
Linux-2.6.12-rc2v2.6.12-rc2
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it. Let it rip!
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
+<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
+ "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" []>
+
+<book id="DoingIO">
+ <bookinfo>
+ <title>Bus-Independent Device Accesses</title>
+
+ <authorgroup>
+ <author>
+ <firstname>Matthew</firstname>
+ <surname>Wilcox</surname>
+ <affiliation>
+ <address>
+ <email>matthew@wil.cx</email>
+ </address>
+ </affiliation>
+ </author>
+ </authorgroup>
+
+ <authorgroup>
+ <author>
+ <firstname>Alan</firstname>
+ <surname>Cox</surname>
+ <affiliation>
+ <address>
+ <email>alan@redhat.com</email>
+ </address>
+ </affiliation>
+ </author>
+ </authorgroup>
+
+ <copyright>
+ <year>2001</year>
+ <holder>Matthew Wilcox</holder>
+ </copyright>
+
+ <legalnotice>
+ <para>
+ This documentation is free software; you can redistribute
+ it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
+ License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
+ version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
+ version.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ This program is distributed in the hope that it will be
+ useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
+ warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+ See the GNU General Public License for more details.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
+ License along with this program; if not, write to the Free
+ Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston,
+ MA 02111-1307 USA
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ For more details see the file COPYING in the source
+ distribution of Linux.
+ </para>
+ </legalnotice>
+ </bookinfo>
+
+<toc></toc>
+
+ <chapter id="intro">
+ <title>Introduction</title>
+ <para>
+ Linux provides an API which abstracts performing IO across all busses
+ and devices, allowing device drivers to be written independently of
+ bus type.
+ </para>
+ </chapter>
+
+ <chapter id="bugs">
+ <title>Known Bugs And Assumptions</title>
+ <para>
+ None.
+ </para>
+ </chapter>
+
+ <chapter id="mmio">
+ <title>Memory Mapped IO</title>
+ <sect1>
+ <title>Getting Access to the Device</title>
+ <para>
+ The most widely supported form of IO is memory mapped IO.
+ That is, a part of the CPU's address space is interpreted
+ not as accesses to memory, but as accesses to a device. Some
+ architectures define devices to be at a fixed address, but most
+ have some method of discovering devices. The PCI bus walk is a
+ good example of such a scheme. This document does not cover how
+ to receive such an address, but assumes you are starting with one.
+ Physical addresses are of type unsigned long.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ This address should not be used directly. Instead, to get an
+ address suitable for passing to the accessor functions described
+ below, you should call <function>ioremap</function>.
+ An address suitable for accessing the device will be returned to you.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ After you've finished using the device (say, in your module's
+ exit routine), call <function>iounmap</function> in order to return
+ the address space to the kernel. Most architectures allocate new
+ address space each time you call <function>ioremap</function>, and
+ they can run out unless you call <function>iounmap</function>.
+ </para>
+ </sect1>
+
+ <sect1>
+ <title>Accessing the device</title>
+ <para>
+ The part of the interface most used by drivers is reading and
+ writing memory-mapped registers on the device. Linux provides
+ interfaces to read and write 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit
+ quantities. Due to a historical accident, these are named byte,
+ word, long and quad accesses. Both read and write accesses are
+ supported; there is no prefetch support at this time.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ The functions are named <function>readb</function>,
+ <function>readw</function>, <function>readl</function>,
+ <function>readq</function>, <function>readb_relaxed</function>,
+ <function>readw_relaxed</function>, <function>readl_relaxed</function>,
+ <function>readq_relaxed</function>, <function>writeb</function>,
+ <function>writew</function>, <function>writel</function> and
+ <function>writeq</function>.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ Some devices (such as framebuffers) would like to use larger
+ transfers than 8 bytes at a time. For these devices, the
+ <function>memcpy_toio</function>, <function>memcpy_fromio</function>
+ and <function>memset_io</function> functions are provided.
+ Do not use memset or memcpy on IO addresses; they
+ are not guaranteed to copy data in order.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ The read and write functions are defined to be ordered. That is the
+ compiler is not permitted to reorder the I/O sequence. When the
+ ordering can be compiler optimised, you can use <function>
+ __readb</function> and friends to indicate the relaxed ordering. Use
+ this with care.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ While the basic functions are defined to be synchronous with respect
+ to each other and ordered with respect to each other the busses the
+ devices sit on may themselves have asynchronicity. In particular many
+ authors are burned by the fact that PCI bus writes are posted
+ asynchronously. A driver author must issue a read from the same
+ device to ensure that writes have occurred in the specific cases the
+ author cares. This kind of property cannot be hidden from driver
+ writers in the API. In some cases, the read used to flush the device
+ may be expected to fail (if the card is resetting, for example). In
+ that case, the read should be done from config space, which is
+ guaranteed to soft-fail if the card doesn't respond.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ The following is an example of flushing a write to a device when
+ the driver would like to ensure the write's effects are visible prior
+ to continuing execution.
+ </para>
+
+<programlisting>
+static inline void
+qla1280_disable_intrs(struct scsi_qla_host *ha)
+{
+ struct device_reg *reg;
+
+ reg = ha->iobase;
+ /* disable risc and host interrupts */
+ WRT_REG_WORD(&amp;reg->ictrl, 0);
+ /*
+ * The following read will ensure that the above write
+ * has been received by the device before we return from this
+ * function.
+ */
+ RD_REG_WORD(&amp;reg->ictrl);
+ ha->flags.ints_enabled = 0;
+}
+</programlisting>
+
+ <para>
+ In addition to write posting, on some large multiprocessing systems
+ (e.g. SGI Challenge, Origin and Altix machines) posted writes won't
+ be strongly ordered coming from different CPUs. Thus it's important
+ to properly protect parts of your driver that do memory-mapped writes
+ with locks and use the <function>mmiowb</function> to make sure they
+ arrive in the order intended. Issuing a regular <function>readX
+ </function> will also ensure write ordering, but should only be used
+ when the driver has to be sure that the write has actually arrived
+ at the device (not that it's simply ordered with respect to other
+ writes), since a full <function>readX</function> is a relatively
+ expensive operation.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ Generally, one should use <function>mmiowb</function> prior to
+ releasing a spinlock that protects regions using <function>writeb
+ </function> or similar functions that aren't surrounded by <function>
+ readb</function> calls, which will ensure ordering and flushing. The
+ following pseudocode illustrates what might occur if write ordering
+ isn't guaranteed via <function>mmiowb</function> or one of the
+ <function>readX</function> functions.
+ </para>
+
+<programlisting>
+CPU A: spin_lock_irqsave(&amp;dev_lock, flags)
+CPU A: ...
+CPU A: writel(newval, ring_ptr);
+CPU A: spin_unlock_irqrestore(&amp;dev_lock, flags)
+ ...
+CPU B: spin_lock_irqsave(&amp;dev_lock, flags)
+CPU B: writel(newval2, ring_ptr);
+CPU B: ...
+CPU B: spin_unlock_irqrestore(&amp;dev_lock, flags)
+</programlisting>
+
+ <para>
+ In the case above, newval2 could be written to ring_ptr before
+ newval. Fixing it is easy though:
+ </para>
+
+<programlisting>
+CPU A: spin_lock_irqsave(&amp;dev_lock, flags)
+CPU A: ...
+CPU A: writel(newval, ring_ptr);
+CPU A: mmiowb(); /* ensure no other writes beat us to the device */
+CPU A: spin_unlock_irqrestore(&amp;dev_lock, flags)
+ ...
+CPU B: spin_lock_irqsave(&amp;dev_lock, flags)
+CPU B: writel(newval2, ring_ptr);
+CPU B: ...
+CPU B: mmiowb();
+CPU B: spin_unlock_irqrestore(&amp;dev_lock, flags)
+</programlisting>
+
+ <para>
+ See tg3.c for a real world example of how to use <function>mmiowb
+ </function>
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ PCI ordering rules also guarantee that PIO read responses arrive
+ after any outstanding DMA writes from that bus, since for some devices
+ the result of a <function>readb</function> call may signal to the
+ driver that a DMA transaction is complete. In many cases, however,
+ the driver may want to indicate that the next
+ <function>readb</function> call has no relation to any previous DMA
+ writes performed by the device. The driver can use
+ <function>readb_relaxed</function> for these cases, although only
+ some platforms will honor the relaxed semantics. Using the relaxed
+ read functions will provide significant performance benefits on
+ platforms that support it. The qla2xxx driver provides examples
+ of how to use <function>readX_relaxed</function>. In many cases,
+ a majority of the driver's <function>readX</function> calls can
+ safely be converted to <function>readX_relaxed</function> calls, since
+ only a few will indicate or depend on DMA completion.
+ </para>
+ </sect1>
+
+ <sect1>
+ <title>ISA legacy functions</title>
+ <para>
+ On older kernels (2.2 and earlier) the ISA bus could be read or
+ written with these functions and without ioremap being used. This is
+ no longer true in Linux 2.4. A set of equivalent functions exist for
+ easy legacy driver porting. The functions available are prefixed
+ with 'isa_' and are <function>isa_readb</function>,
+ <function>isa_writeb</function>, <function>isa_readw</function>,
+ <function>isa_writew</function>, <function>isa_readl</function>,
+ <function>isa_writel</function>, <function>isa_memcpy_fromio</function>
+ and <function>isa_memcpy_toio</function>
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ These functions should not be used in new drivers, and will
+ eventually be going away.
+ </para>
+ </sect1>
+
+ </chapter>
+
+ <chapter>
+ <title>Port Space Accesses</title>
+ <sect1>
+ <title>Port Space Explained</title>
+
+ <para>
+ Another form of IO commonly supported is Port Space. This is a
+ range of addresses separate to the normal memory address space.
+ Access to these addresses is generally not as fast as accesses
+ to the memory mapped addresses, and it also has a potentially
+ smaller address space.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ Unlike memory mapped IO, no preparation is required
+ to access port space.
+ </para>
+
+ </sect1>
+ <sect1>
+ <title>Accessing Port Space</title>
+ <para>
+ Accesses to this space are provided through a set of functions
+ which allow 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit accesses; also
+ known as byte, word and long. These functions are
+ <function>inb</function>, <function>inw</function>,
+ <function>inl</function>, <function>outb</function>,
+ <function>outw</function> and <function>outl</function>.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ Some variants are provided for these functions. Some devices
+ require that accesses to their ports are slowed down. This
+ functionality is provided by appending a <function>_p</function>
+ to the end of the function. There are also equivalents to memcpy.
+ The <function>ins</function> and <function>outs</function>
+ functions copy bytes, words or longs to the given port.
+ </para>
+ </sect1>
+
+ </chapter>
+
+ <chapter id="pubfunctions">
+ <title>Public Functions Provided</title>
+!Einclude/asm-i386/io.h
+ </chapter>
+
+</book>