[Linaro-mm-sig] [RFC 1/2] dma-buf: Introduce dma buffer sharing mechanism

[Dave Airlie]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Sumit Semwal <sumit.semwal at ti.com> wrote:
> This is the first step in defining a dma buffer sharing mechanism.
>
> A new buffer object dma_buf is added, with operations and API to allow easy
> sharing of this buffer object across devices.
>
> The framework allows:
> - a new buffer-object to be created with fixed size.
> - different devices to 'attach' themselves to this buffer, to facilitate
>  backing storage negotiation, using dma_buf_attach() API.
> - association of a file pointer with each user-buffer and associated
>   allocator-defined operations on that buffer. This operation is called the
>   'export' operation.
> - this exported buffer-object to be shared with the other entity by asking for
>   its 'file-descriptor (fd)', and sharing the fd across.
> - a received fd to get the buffer object back, where it can be accessed using
>   the associated exporter-defined operations.
> - the exporter and user to share the scatterlist using get_scatterlist and
>   put_scatterlist operations.
>
> Atleast one 'attach()' call is required to be made prior to calling the
> get_scatterlist() operation.
>
> Couple of building blocks in get_scatterlist() are added to ease introduction
> of sync'ing across exporter and users, and late allocation by the exporter.
>
> mmap() file operation is provided for the associated 'fd', as wrapper over the
> optional allocator defined mmap(), to be used by devices that might need one.
>
> More details are there in the documentation patch.
>

Some questions, I've started playing around with using this framework
to do buffer sharing between DRM devices,

Why struct scatterlist and not struct sg_table? it seems like I really
want to use an sg_table,

I'm not convinced fd's are really useful over just some idr allocated
handle, so far I'm just returning the "fd" to userspace as a handle,
and passing it back in the other side, so I'm not really sure what an
fd wins us here, apart from the mmap thing which I think shouldn't be
here anyways.
(if fd's do win us more we should probably record that in the docs patch).

Dave.