[LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] dmabuf backed read/write

[Keith Busch]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2026 at 02:29:55PM +0000, Pavel Begunkov wrote:
> Good day everyone,
> 
> dma-buf is a powerful abstraction for managing buffers and DMA mappings,
> and there is growing interest in extending it to the read/write path to
> enable device-to-device transfers without bouncing data through system
> memory. I was encouraged to submit it to LSF/MM/BPF as that might be
> useful to mull over details and what capabilities and features people
> may need.
> 
> The proposal consists of two parts. The first is a small in-kernel
> framework that allows a dma-buf to be registered against a given file
> and returns an object representing a DMA mapping. The actual mapping
> creation is delegated to the target subsystem (e.g. NVMe). This
> abstraction centralises request accounting, mapping management, dynamic
> recreation, etc. The resulting mapping object is passed through the I/O
> stack via a new iov_iter type.
> 
> As for the user API, a dma-buf is installed as an io_uring registered
> buffer for a specific file. Once registered, the buffer can be used by
> read / write io_uring requests as normal. io_uring will enforce that the
> buffer is only used with "compatible files", which is for now restricted
> to the target registration file, but will be expanded in the future.
> Notably, io_uring is a consumer of the framework rather than a
> dependency, and the infrastructure can be reused.
> 
> It took a couple of iterations on the list to get it to the current
> design, v2 of the series can be looked up at [1], which implements the
> infrastructure and initial wiring for NVMe. It slightly diverges from
> the description above, as some of the framework bits are block specific,
> and I'll be working on refining that and simplifying some of the
> interfaces for v3. A good chunk of block handling is based on prior work
> from Keith that was pre DMA mapping buffers [2].
> 
> Tushar was helping and mention he got good numbers for P2P transfers
> compared to bouncing it via RAM. Anuj, Kanchan and Nitesh also
> previously reported encouraging results for system memory backed
> dma-buf for optimising IOMMU overhead, quoting Anuj:
> 
> - STRICT: before = 570 KIOPS, after = 5.01 MIOPS
> - LAZY: before = 1.93 MIOPS, after = 5.01 MIOPS
> - PASSTHROUGH: before = 5.01 MIOPS, after = 5.01 MIOPS

Thanks for submitting the topic. The performance wins look great, but
I'm a little surpised passthrough didn't show any difference. We're
still skipping a bit of transformations with the dmabuf compared to not
having it, so maybe it's just a matter of crafting the right benchmark
to show the benefit.

Anyway, I look forward to the next version of this feature. I promise to
have more cycles to review and test the v3.