This patch follows from an RFC we did earlier this year [1]. This patchset applies cleanly to v4.9-rc1. Updates since RFC ----------------- Rebased. Included the iopmem driver in the submission. History ------- There have been several attempts to upstream patchsets that enable DMAs between PCIe peers. These include Peer-Direct [2] and DMA-Buf style patches [3]. None have been successful to date. Haggai Eran gives a nice overview of the prior art in this space in his cover letter [3]. Motivation and Use Cases ------------------------ PCIe IO devices are getting faster. It is not uncommon now to find PCIe network and storage devices that can generate and consume several GB/s. Almost always these devices have either a high performance DMA engine, a number of exposed PCIe BARs or both. Until this patch, any high-performance transfer of information between two PICe devices has required the use of a staging buffer in system memory. With this patch the bandwidth to system memory is not compromised when high-throughput transfers occurs between PCIe devices. This means that more system memory bandwidth is available to the CPU cores for data processing and manipulation. In addition, in systems where the two PCIe devices reside behind a PCIe switch the datapath avoids the CPU entirely. Consumers --------- We provide a PCIe device driver in an accompanying patch that can be used to map any PCIe BAR into a DAX capable block device. For non-persistent BARs this simply serves as an alternative to using system memory bounce buffers. For persistent BARs this can serve as an additional storage device in the system. Testing and Performance ----------------------- We have done a moderate about of testing of this patch on a QEMU environment and on real hardware. On real hardware we have observed peer-to-peer writes of up to 4GB/s and reads of up to 1.2 GB/s. In both cases these numbers are limitations of our consumer hardware. In addition, we have observed that the CPU DRAM bandwidth is not impacted when using IOPMEM which is not the case when a traditional path through system memory is taken. For more information on the testing and performance results see the GitHub site [4]. Known Issues ------------ 1. Address Translation. Suggestions have been made that in certain architectures and topologies the dma_addr_t passed to the DMA master in a peer-2-peer transfer will not correctly route to the IO memory intended. However in our testing to date we have not seen this to be an issue, even in systems with IOMMUs and PCIe switches. It is our understanding that an IOMMU only maps system memory and would not interfere with device memory regions. (It certainly has no opportunity to do so if the transfer gets routed through a switch). 2. Memory Segment Spacing. This patch has the same limitations that ZONE_DEVICE does in that memory regions must be spaces at least SECTION_SIZE bytes part. On x86 this is 128MB and there are cases where BARs can be placed closer together than this. Thus ZONE_DEVICE would not be usable on neighboring BARs. For our purposes, this is not an issue as we'd only be looking at enabling a single BAR in a given PCIe device. More exotic use cases may have problems with this. 3. Coherency Issues. When IOMEM is written from both the CPU and a PCIe peer there is potential for coherency issues and for writes to occur out of order. This is something that users of this feature need to be cognizant of. Though really, this isn't much different than the existing situation with things like RDMA: if userspace sets up an MR for remote use, they need to be careful about using that memory region themselves. 4. Architecture. Currently this patch is applicable only to x86_64 architectures. The same is true for much of the code pertaining to PMEM and ZONE_DEVICE. It is hoped that the work will be extended to other ARCH over time. References ---------- [1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/8583221/ [2] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.rdma/21849 [3] http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-rdma/msg38748.html [4] https://github.com/sbates130272/zone-device Logan Gunthorpe (1): memremap.c : Add support for ZONE_DEVICE IO memory with struct pages. Stephen Bates (2): iopmem : Add a block device driver for PCIe attached IO memory. iopmem : Add documentation for iopmem driver Documentation/blockdev/00-INDEX | 2 + Documentation/blockdev/iopmem.txt | 62 +++++++ MAINTAINERS | 7 + drivers/block/Kconfig | 27 ++++ drivers/block/Makefile | 1 + drivers/block/iopmem.c | 333 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ drivers/dax/pmem.c | 4 +- drivers/nvdimm/pmem.c | 4 +- include/linux/memremap.h | 5 +- kernel/memremap.c | 80 ++++++++- tools/testing/nvdimm/test/iomap.c | 3 +- 11 files changed, 518 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) create mode 100644 Documentation/blockdev/iopmem.txt create mode 100644 drivers/block/iopmem.c -- 2.1.4 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-block" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
