[RFC 0/8] Copy Offload with Peer-to-Peer PCI Memory

[Logan Gunthorpe]

On 18/04/17 01:01 PM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> Ultimately every dma_ops will need special code to support P2P with
> the special hardware that ops is controlling, so it makes some sense
> to start by pushing the check down there in the first place. This
> advice is partially motivated by how dma_map_sg is just a small
> wrapper around the function pointer call...

Yes, I noticed this problem too and that makes sense. It just means
every dma_ops will probably need to be modified to either support p2p
pages or fail on them. Though, the only real difficulty there is that it
will be a lot of work.

> Where p2p_same_segment_map_page checks if the two devices are on the
> 'same switch' and if so returns the address translated to match the
> bus address programmed into the BAR or fails. We knows this case is
> required to work by the PCI spec, so it makes sense to use it as the
> first canned helper.

I've also suggested that this check should probably be done (or perhaps
duplicated) before we even get to the map stage. In the case of
nvme-fabrics we'd probably want to let the user know when they try to
configure it or at least fall back to allocating regular memory instead.
It would be a difficult situation to have already copied a block of data
from a NIC to p2p memory only to have it be deemed unmappable on the
NVMe device it's destined for. (Or vice-versa.) This was another issue
p2pmem was attempting to solve.

Logan