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

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 2:03 PM, Jason Gunthorpe
<jgunthorpe at obsidianresearch.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 12:48:35PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
>
>> > 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.
>>
>> I don't think you need to go touch all dma_ops, I think you can just
>> arrange for devices that are going to do dma to get redirected to a
>> p2p aware provider of operations that overrides the system default
>> dma_ops. I.e. just touch get_dma_ops().
>
> I don't follow, when does get_dma_ops() return a p2p aware provider?
> It has no way to know if the DMA is going to involve p2p, get_dma_ops
> is called with the device initiating the DMA.
>
> So you'd always return the P2P shim on a system that has registered
> P2P memory?
>
> Even so, how does this shim work? dma_ops are not really intended to
> be stacked. How would we make unmap work, for instance? What happens
> when the underlying iommu dma ops actually natively understands p2p
> and doesn't want the shim?
>
> I think this opens an even bigger can of worms..

No, I don't think it does. You'd only shim when the target page is
backed by a device, not host memory, and you can figure this out by a
is_zone_device_page()-style lookup.