[RFC PATCH 4/7] iommu: provide helper function to configure an IOMMU for an of master

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Monday 01 September 2014 10:29:40 Thierry Reding wrote:
> 
> I think this could use a bit more formalization. As I said in another
> reply earlier, there's very little standardization in the IOMMU API.
> That certainly gives us a lot of flexibility but it also has the
> downside that it's difficult to handle these abstractions in the core,
> which is really what the core is all about, isn't it?
> 
> One method that worked really well for this in the past for other
> subsystems is to allow drivers to specify an .of_xlate() function that
> takes the controller device and a struct of_phandle_args. It is that
> function's responsibility to take the information in an of_phandle_args
> structure and use that to create some subsystem specific handle that
> represents this information in a way that it can readily be used.

Yes, good idea.

> So I think it would really be helpful if IOMMU gained support for
> something similar. We could create a struct iommu to represent an
> instance of an IOMMU. IOMMU drivers can embed this structure and add
> device-specific fields that they need. That way we can easily pass
> around instances and upcast in the driver in a type-safe way.

Right.

> At the same time, a struct iommu_master could provide the basis to
> represent a single master interface on an IOMMU. Drivers can again embed
> that in driver-specific structures with additional fields required for
> the particular IOMMU implementation. .of_xlate() could return such an
> IOMMU master for the core to use.

I'm not convinced it's necessary. Could this just be a 'struct device'
instead of 'struct iommu_master'?

> With such structures in place we should be able to eliminate many of the
> loops in IOMMU drivers that serve no other purpose than to find the
> master context from a struct device * and some parameters. It will also
> allow us to keep a central registry of IOMMUs and masters rather than
> duplicating that in every driver.

Yes, we should be able to identify an iommu context in a generic way,
but why do you want to break it down to individual masters within
one context?

	Arnd