[RFC 3/3] mm: iommu: The Virtual Contiguous Memory Manager

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:30:43 +0900
FUJITA Tomonori <fujita.tomonori at lab.ntt.co.jp> wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:20:12 +0100
> Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> > > Why video4linux can't use the DMA API? Doing DMA with vmalloc'ed
> > > buffers is a thing that we should avoid (there are some exceptions
> > > like xfs though).
> > 
> > Vmalloc is about the only API for creating virtually linear memory areas.
> > The video stuff really needs that to avoid lots of horrible special cases
> > when doing buffer processing and the like.
> > 
> > Pretty much each driver using it has a pair of functions 'rvmalloc' and
> > 'rvfree' so given a proper "vmalloc_for_dma()" type interface can easily
> > be switched
> 
> We already have helper functions for DMA with vmap pages,
> flush_kernel_vmap_range and invalidate_kernel_vmap_range.

I'm not sure they help at all because the DMA user for these pages isn't
the video driver - it's the USB layer, and the USB layer isn't
specifically aware it is being passed vmap pages.

Alan