On 11/10/2011 9:09 AM, Joerg Roedel wrote:
The plan is to have a single DMA-API implementation for all IOMMU drivers (X86 and ARM) which just uses the IOMMU-API. But to make this performing reasonalbly well a few changes to the IOMMU-API are required. I already have some ideas which we can discuss if you want.
I have been experimenting with an iommu_map_range call, which maps a given scatterlist of discontiguous physical pages into a contiguous virtual region at a given IOVA. This has some performance advantages over just calling iommu_map iteratively. First, it reduces the amount of table walking / calculation needed for mapping each page, given how you know that all the pages will be mapped into a single virtually-contiguous region (so in most cases, the first-level table calculation can be reused). Second, it allows one to defer the TLB (and sometimes cache) maintenance operations until the entire scatterlist has been mapped, rather than doing a TLB invalidate after mapping each page, as would have been the case if iommu_map were just being called from within a loop. Granted, just using iommu_map many times may be acceptable on the slow path, but I have seen significant performance gains when using this approach on the fast path.
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