[PATCH] sparc64: Use relaxed ordering for DMA_FROM_DEVICE mappings on sun4v

From: Stian Halseth

Date: Tue Oct 13 2026 - 11:24:31 EST


sun4v IOMMU and ATU mappings carry a relaxed ordering attribute, but
dma_4v_map_phys() and dma_4v_map_sg() set it only when the caller
passes DMA_ATTR_WEAK_ORDERING. Some network drivers do, storage drivers
do not. Without it every device write into memory is strictly ordered,
which on a T7-1 (M7) caps DMA reads at about 280 MiB/s per PCIe device
while writes run at full speed.

Set the attribute for every DMA_FROM_DEVICE streaming mapping. Devices
report completion through coherent memory or an interrupt, which stay
strictly ordered, and a strictly ordered write does not pass the writes
before it.

T7-1, fio 1M sequential read, QD32:

before after
NVMe (PM1725, x4) 281 MiB/s 3169 MiB/s
SATA SSD (mpt3sas) 278 MiB/s 502 MiB/s

Closes: https://github.com/sparclinux/issues/issues/114
Signed-off-by: Stian Halseth <stian@xxxxxx>
---
Tested on a T7-1 (M7) and a T4-1:

- T7: fresh RAID1 on two NVMe drives, 192 GB fio crc32c write+verify
and md check: no errors, mismatch_cnt 0.
- T7 and T4: file checksums on the SAS boot mirrors identical to a
strictly ordered kernel; no new messages in dmesg.
- 4k random read and sequential writes unchanged.

arch/sparc/kernel/pci_sun4v.c | 4 ++--
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/sparc/kernel/pci_sun4v.c b/arch/sparc/kernel/pci_sun4v.c
index 61f14b4c8f90d..4dd17b65dd6cc 100644
--- a/arch/sparc/kernel/pci_sun4v.c
+++ b/arch/sparc/kernel/pci_sun4v.c
@@ -403,7 +403,7 @@ static dma_addr_t dma_4v_map_phys(struct device *dev, phys_addr_t phys,
if (direction != DMA_TO_DEVICE)
prot |= HV_PCI_MAP_ATTR_WRITE;

- if (attrs & DMA_ATTR_WEAK_ORDERING)
+ if (direction == DMA_FROM_DEVICE || (attrs & DMA_ATTR_WEAK_ORDERING))
prot |= HV_PCI_MAP_ATTR_RELAXED_ORDER;

local_irq_save(flags);
@@ -503,7 +503,7 @@ static int dma_4v_map_sg(struct device *dev, struct scatterlist *sglist,
if (direction != DMA_TO_DEVICE)
prot |= HV_PCI_MAP_ATTR_WRITE;

- if (attrs & DMA_ATTR_WEAK_ORDERING)
+ if (direction == DMA_FROM_DEVICE || (attrs & DMA_ATTR_WEAK_ORDERING))
prot |= HV_PCI_MAP_ATTR_RELAXED_ORDER;

outs = s = segstart = &sglist[0];
--
2.43.0