[PATCH 00/14] DMA-mapping framework redesign preparation
Marek Szyprowski
m.szyprowski at samsung.com
Tue Dec 27 03:25:25 EST 2011
Hello,
On Friday, December 23, 2011 5:35 PM Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 01:27:19PM +0100, Marek Szyprowski wrote:
> > The first issue we identified is the fact that on some platform (again,
> > mainly ARM) there are several functions for allocating DMA buffers:
> > dma_alloc_coherent, dma_alloc_writecombine and dma_alloc_noncoherent
>
> Is this write-combining from the point of view of the device (ie iommu),
> or from the point of view of the CPU, or both?
It is about write-combining from the CPU point of view. Right now there are
no devices with such advanced memory interface to do write combining on the
DMA side, but I believe that they might appear at some point in the future
as well.
> > The next step in dma mapping framework update is the introduction of
> > dma_mmap/dma_mmap_attrs() function. There are a number of drivers
> > (mainly V4L2 and ALSA) that only exports the DMA buffers to user space.
> > Creating a userspace mapping with correct page attributes is not an easy
> > task for the driver. Also the DMA-mapping framework is the only place
> > where the complete information about the allocated pages is available,
> > especially if the implementation uses IOMMU controller to provide a
> > contiguous buffer in DMA address space which is scattered in physical
> > memory space.
>
> Surely we only need a helper which drivrs can call from their mmap routine
> to solve this?
On ARM architecture it is already implemented this way and a bunch of drivers
use dma_mmap_coherent/dma_mmap_writecombine calls. We would like to standardize
these calls across all architectures.
> > Usually these drivers don't touch the buffer data at all, so the mapping
> > in kernel virtual address space is not needed. We can introduce
> > DMA_ATTRIB_NO_KERNEL_MAPPING attribute which lets kernel to skip/ignore
> > creation of kernel virtual mapping. This way we can save previous
> > vmalloc area and simply some mapping operation on a few architectures.
>
> I really think this wants to be a separate function. dma_alloc_coherent
> is for allocating memory to be shared between the kernel and a driver;
> we already have dma_map_sg for mapping userspace I/O as an alternative
> interface. This feels like it's something different again rather than
> an option to dma_alloc_coherent.
That is just a starting point for the discussion.
I thought about this API a bit and came to conclusion that there is no much
difference between a dma_alloc_coherent which creates a mapping in kernel
virtual space and the one that does not. It is just a hint from the driver
that it will not use that mapping at all. Of course this attribute makes sense
only together with adding a dma_mmap_attrs() call, because otherwise drivers
won't be able to get access to the buffer data.
On coherent architectures where dma_alloc_coherent is just a simple wrapper
around alloc_pages_exact() such attribute can be simply ignored without any
impact on the drivers (that's the main idea behind dma attributes!).
However such hint will help a lot on non-coherent architectures where
additional work need to be done to provide a cohenent mapping in kernel
address space. It also saves some precious kernel resources like vmalloc
address range.
Best regards
--
Marek Szyprowski
Samsung Poland R&D Center
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