[PATCH v2 00/10] Copy Offload in NVMe Fabrics with P2P PCI Memory

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 12:34 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt
<benh at au1.ibm.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-03-01 at 11:21 -0800, Dan Williams wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 7:56 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt
>> <benh at au1.ibm.com> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2018-03-01 at 14:54 +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>> > > On Wed, 2018-02-28 at 16:39 -0700, Logan Gunthorpe wrote:
>> > > > Hi Everyone,
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > So Oliver (CC) was having issues getting any of that to work for us.
>> > >
>> > > The problem is that acccording to him (I didn't double check the latest
>> > > patches) you effectively hotplug the PCIe memory into the system when
>> > > creating struct pages.
>> > >
>> > > This cannot possibly work for us. First we cannot map PCIe memory as
>> > > cachable. (Note that doing so is a bad idea if you are behind a PLX
>> > > switch anyway since you'd ahve to manage cache coherency in SW).
>> >
>> > Note: I think the above means it won't work behind a switch on x86
>> > either, will it ?
>>
>> The devm_memremap_pages() infrastructure allows placing the memmap in
>> "System-RAM" even if the hotplugged range is in PCI space. So, even if
>> it is an issue on some configurations, it's just a simple adjustment
>> to where the memmap is placed.
>
> But what happens with that PCI memory ? Is it effectively turned into
> nromal memory (ie, usable for normal allocations, potentially used to
> populate user pages etc...) or is it kept aside ?
>
> Also on ppc64, the physical addresses of PCIe make it so far appart
> that there's no way we can map them into the linear mapping at the
> normal offset of PAGE_OFFSET + (pfn << PAGE_SHIFT), so things like
> page_address or virt_to_page cannot work as-is on PCIe addresses.

Ah ok, I'd need to look at the details. I had been assuming that
sparse-vmemmap could handle such a situation, but that could indeed be
a broken assumption.