Re: [PATCHv9 0/6] dmaengine: rcar-dmac: add iommu support for slave transfers

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On 16/09/16 13:05, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
[...]
>>>> One concern I have is that we might get an awkward situation if we ever
>>>> encounter one DMA engine hardware that is used in different systems that
>>>> all have an IOMMU, but on some of them the connection between the DMA
>>>> master and the slave FIFO bypasses the IOMMU while on others the IOMMU
>>>> is required.
>>>
>>> Do you mean systems where some of the channels of a specific DMA engine go
>>> through the IOMMU while others do not ? We indeed have no solution today
>>> for such a situation.
>>>
>>> The problem is a bit broader than that, we'll also have an issue with DMA
>>> engines that have different channels served by different IOMMUs. I recall
>>> discussing this in the past with you, and the solution you proposed was to
>>> add a channel index to struct dma_attrs seems good to me. To support the
>>> case where some channels don't go through an IOMMU we would only need
>>> support for null entries in the IOMMUs list associated with a device (for
>>> instance in the DT case null entries in the iommus property).
>>
>> I think at that point we just create the channels as child devices of
>> the main dmaengine device so they each get their own DMA ops, and can do
>> whatever. The Qualcomm HIDMA driver already does that for a very similar
>> reason (so that the IOMMU can map individual channels into different
>> guest VMs).
> 
> That's another option, but it seems more like a workaround to me, instead of a 
> proper solution to fix the more global problem of multiple memory paths within 
> a single device. I have other hardware devices that can act as bus masters 
> through different paths (for instance a display-related device that fetches 
> data and commands through different paths). Luckily so far all those paths are 
> served by the same IOMMU, but there's no guarantee this will remain true in 
> the future. Furthermore, even today, the IOMMU connected to that device has 
> the ability to selectively enable and disable its ports. I have to keep them 
> all enabled due to the lack of channel information in the DMA mapping and 
> IOMMU APIs, leading to increased power consumption.

Indeed, I think both the Exynos and Rockchip IOMMU drivers already do
cater for a device mastering though multiple discrete IOMMUs, not being
the fancy multi-port multi-context ones like yours and mine.

I guess what we could really do with is a decent abstraction of
multi-master peripherals at the device level; a "threads within the same
process" sort of granularity, as it were. I'd envisage it more along the
lines of how we handle NUMA, i.e. dma_map_page_attrs(...) becomes a
wrapper for dma_map_page_attrs_multi(..., CHANNEL_ALL), and trickier
users can call the latter with the a more specific channel(s) argument
(maybe it's a bitmask rather than an index). Meanwhile,
dev->archdata.dma_ops may point to a device-specific array of
dma_map_ops, which the DMA API backend iterates over if necessary.

Strangely, that doesn't actually sound too horrible.

Robin.

> 
>>> Now I see that struct dma_attrs has been replaced by unsigned long in
>>>
>>> commit 00085f1efa387a8ce100e3734920f7639c80caa3
>>> Author: Krzysztof Kozlowski <k.kozlowski@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>>> Date:   Wed Aug 3 13:46:00 2016 -0700
>>>
>>>     dma-mapping: use unsigned long for dma_attrs
>>>
>>> We still have enough bits to reserve some of them for a channel number,
>>> but I'm not very happy with that patch as I can see how a future proposal
>>> to handle the channel number through the DMA attributes will get rejected
>>> on the grounds of bits starvation then :-(
>>>
>>>> I don't have any idea for how this could be handled in a generic way, so
>>>> my best answer here is to hope we never get there, and if we do, handle
>>>> it using some local hack in the driver.
> 

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