Simone
c04e0ec5a8
The engine encodes an address-only transaction in command word bit 18, which is what SMBus Receive Byte and Send Byte need and what was missing for ee1004 to bind. The bit is not documented for the PCU function. It was located by structure rather than by sweeping: SMBCMD on the iMC channel function (datasheet ref. 614073 section 3.1.8) places PNTR_SEL immediately above WORD_ACCESS, and word access here is bit 17. Bit 17 had itself been unknown until it turned out to be word access, and an earlier sweep of this register covered bits 31:20 only, so 18 was untried rather than already ruled out. Validated against the device rather than against the register. An EEPROM auto-increments its pointer after a read, so priming the pointer and repeating the read with the bit set has a predicted answer: the next byte, not the one named. Eight consecutive reads returned SPD bytes 0x01 through 0x08 in order, matching an ordinary dump. Send Byte was confirmed on the DDR4 page-select addresses, which hold a latch and store no data, so the page state is itself the readout. Result: ee1004 binds on all four SPD addresses and decode-dimms decodes all four modules with both CRCs valid on each. The part number comes off page 1, so the page select runs end to end. The four module serial numbers are unchanged from the baseline recorded before this series. SMBus Quick stays unimplemented. Beyond having no obvious encoding, a write into the 0x30-0x37 range is how an EE1004 SPD is write-protected, permanently on many modules, so an adapter on the memory bus should not advertise a probe that writes. i2cdetect scans in read mode. Also fix test-smoke.sh resolving the module through modinfo, which silently tested the installed DKMS build instead of the one just compiled. It now prefers the local .ko and prints which it loaded. Smoke suite: 19 passed, 0 failed. checkpatch --strict 0/0/0, in-tree W=1 and Sparse clean.
Intel Skylake-X iMC SMBus I2C Driver
An experimental Linux PCI driver for the SMBus engine in the integrated memory
controller (iMC) of Intel Skylake-X and Cascade Lake-X processors
(PCU function 8086:2085).
The engine reaches the DDR4 DIMMs: SPD EEPROMs at 0x50-0x57, thermal
sensors (TSOD) at 0x18-0x1f, and whatever else a given module carries on
those lines. The driver registers it as two standard Linux I2C adapters, one
per hardware channel, so i2c-tools, decode-dimms and lm-sensors work
without custom raw PCI writes.
Warning
The engine has no arbitration mechanism. SMM, a BMC and the memory controller's own closed-loop thermal throttling (CLTT) can drive the same registers, and the PCI ID does not tell the driver whether any of them is active. The driver is disabled by default and binds only with
allow_unsafe_access=1. Use it only where concurrent firmware access has been excluded — and check the log for the interference warning described below.
Upstream status
Patch series v2 is archived on lore.kernel.org and received no replies.
The next posting is [PATCH v4], a single patch. See
docs/submission/cover-letter.txt.
No iMC I2C driver has ever been merged into mainline. Andy Lutomirski's
i2c_imc (2013-2016) and Stefan Schaeckeler's 2020 Broadwell rewrite both
stalled on the same firmware-arbitration problem. This driver does not solve it
either; it detects it. See the cover letter for what that means in practice.
Retracted: the CF8/CFC claim
Up to v3 this project claimed that firmware filters CF8/CFC config writes to the PCU function, and that the registers were reachable only through the memory-mapped window. That was wrong. It was never tested directly; the only evidence was a boot log line naming the access method.
Measured on this board, driver unloaded:
# setpci -s 16:1e.5 9c.L=20085002 # read SPD 0x50, register 0x02
# setpci -s 16:1e.5 9c.L
20005002 # GO consumed
# setpci -s 16:1e.5 a8.L
0000500c # READ_DONE, no error
# setpci -s 16:1e.5 b4.L
0000000c # SPD byte 2: DDR4 type code
The command executes and returns correct data through the ordinary accessors,
and MSR_SMI_COUNT does not move across it. The driver now uses
pci_read_config_dword() and pci_write_config_dword() like any other driver.
Reproduce with tools/probe-cf8-transaction.sh.
What the driver does about concurrency
- serializes both channels under one mutex and waits for the whole engine to be idle before touching any register;
- saves the command state of both channels, clears TSOD_ACTIVE for the duration of the transfer, restores both afterwards;
- compares the command registers after every transfer against what it left
in them, and fails with
-EAGAINif anything else changed; - reads the command word back and requires it to be the one just written, because the done bits are latched and a stale DONE would otherwise let a command that never reached the register look like a completed transfer.
If your log shows
i2c-imc-skylake 0000:16:1e.5: ch0 command changed under us (...): another master is using the engine
then firmware is using the engine on your system. Unload the driver.
Not implemented: the Broadwell-E iMC driver additionally stops the PCU's TSOD polling for the duration of a transfer. The equivalent register has not been identified on this part — see tools/README.md.
Origin & use case
This driver started from the need to reach the ENE KB9012 LED controller on Kingston FURY DDR4 RGB modules under Linux on X299, which is on the same iMC SMBus lines. It is device-oriented rather than tied to a DIMM brand; the practical uses are:
- reading DDR4 SPD data and DIMM thermal sensors with standard tools;
- OpenRGB and other userspace daemons for modules whose controllers sit on these buses.
Installation
Prerequisites
# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install build-essential i2c-tools strace linux-headers-$(uname -r)
# Fedora / RHEL
sudo dnf install gcc i2c-tools make strace kernel-devel
Build & load
make # build
make checkpatch # style
make reload ALLOW_UNSAFE=1 # load for testing, after checking arbitration
sudo make install # install into the kernel tree
To permit a later modprobe or PCI modalias load:
echo 'options i2c-imc-skylake allow_unsafe_access=1' | \
sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/i2c-imc-skylake.conf
This opt-in is intentionally not installed by the project.
DKMS
sudo apt-get install dkms
sudo dkms add .
sudo dkms install -m i2c-imc-skylake -v 1.0.0
Verification
i2cdetect -l | grep iMC
i2c-6 smbus iMC SMBus Skylake-X channel 0 SMBus adapter
i2c-7 smbus iMC SMBus Skylake-X channel 1 SMBus adapter
The driver advertises SMBus BYTE_DATA and WORD_DATA only, so i2cdetect cannot
scan the bus. Read a device directly — SPD byte 2 (DDR4 type code 0x0c) from
EEPROM 0x50 on channel 0:
sudo i2cget -y 6 0x50 0x02
The adapter does not instantiate ee1004 or jc42 clients. Check first that
the address is not already bound, then:
echo ee1004 0x50 | sudo tee /sys/bus/i2c/devices/i2c-6/new_device
echo jc42 0x18 | sudo tee /sys/bus/i2c/devices/i2c-6/new_device
Read-only integration test against the module just built:
make
sudo make test
Hardware measurements still owed to the upstream submission are in tools/README.md.
License
GPL v2 only (GPL-2.0-only).