If we add something new, we need clear rules and not just "here's the kvm code that uses it". That's how we've done dma-buf at first, and it was a terrible mess of mismatched expecations.Yes, that would be wrong. It should be self defined within dmabuf and kvm should adopt to it, move semantics and all.Ack. I feel like we have a plan here.
I think I have to object a bit on that.
Summary from my side: - Sort out pin vs revocable vs dynamic/moveable semantics, make sure importers have no surprises. - Adopt whatever new dma-api datastructures pops out of the dma-api reworks. - Add pfn based memory access as yet another optional access method, with helpers so that exporters who support this get all the others for free. I don't see a strict ordering between these, imo should be driven by actual users of the dma-buf api. Already done: - dmem cgroup so that we can resource control device pinnings just landed in drm-next for next merge window. So that part is imo sorted and we can charge ahead with pinning into device memory without all the concerns we've had years ago when discussing that for p2p dma-buf support. But there might be some work so that we can p2p pin without requiring dynamic attachments only, I haven't checked whether that needs adjustment in dma-buf.c code or just in exporters. Anything missing?
Well as far as I can see this use case is not a good fit for the DMA-buf interfaces in the first place. DMA-buf deals with devices and buffer exchange.
What's necessary here instead is to give an importing VM full access on some memory for their specific use case.
That full access includes CPU and DMA mappings, modifying caching attributes, potentially setting encryption keys for specific ranges etc.... etc...
In other words we have a lot of things the importer here should be able to do which we don't want most of the DMA-buf importers to do.
The semantics for things like pin vs revocable vs dynamic/moveable seems similar, but that's basically it.
As far as I know the TEE subsystem also represents their allocations as file descriptors. If I'm not completely mistaken this use case most likely fit's better there.
I feel like this is small enough that m-l archives is good enough. For some of the bigger projects we do in graphics we sometimes create entries in our kerneldoc with wip design consensus and things like that. But feels like overkill here.My general desire is to move all of RDMA's MR process away from scatterlist and work using only the new DMA API. This will save *huge* amounts of memory in common workloads and be the basis for non-struct page DMA support, including P2P.Yeah a more memory efficient structure than the scatterlist would be really nice. That would even benefit the very special dma-buf exporters where you cannot get a pfn and only the dma_addr_t, altough most of those (all maybe even?) have contig buffers, so your scatterlist has only one entry. But it would definitely be nice from a design pov.
Completely agree on that part.
Scatterlist have a some design flaws, especially mixing the input and out parameters of the DMA API into the same structure.
Additional to that DMA addresses are basically missing which bus they belong to and details how the access should be made (e.g. snoop vs no-snoop etc...).
Aside: A way to more efficiently create compressed scatterlists would be neat too, because a lot of drivers hand-roll that and it's a bit brittle and kinda silly to duplicate. With compressed I mean just a single entry for a contig range, in practice thanks to huge pages/folios and allocators trying to hand out contig ranges if there's plenty of memory that saves a lot of memory too. But currently it's a bit a pain to construct these efficiently, mostly it's just a two-pass approach and then trying to free surplus memory or krealloc to fit. Also I don't have good ideas here, but dma-api folks might have some from looking at too many things that create scatterlists.
I mailed with Christoph about that a while back as well and we both agreed that it would probably be a good idea to start defining a data structure to better encapsulate DMA addresses.
It's just that nobody had time for that yet and/or I wasn't looped in in the final discussion about it.
Regards,
Christian.
-Sima
