On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 05:29:22PM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote: > The swiotlb is a very convenient fallback mechanism for bounce buffering of > DMAable data. It is usually used for the compatibility case where devices > can only DMA to a "low region". > > However, in some scenarios this "low region" may be bound even more > heavily. For example, there are embedded system where only an SRAM region > is shared between device and CPU. There are also heterogeneous computing > scenarios where only a subset of RAM is cache coherent between the > components of the system. There are partitioning hypervisors, where > a "control VM" that implements device emulation has limited view into a > partition's memory for DMA capabilities due to safety concerns. > > This patch adds a command line driven mechanism to move all DMA memory into > a predefined shared memory region which may or may not be part of the > physical address layout of the Operating System. > > Ideally, the typical path to set this configuration would be through Device > Tree or ACPI, but neither of the two mechanisms is standardized yet. Also, > in the x86 MicroVM use case, we have neither ACPI nor Device Tree, but > instead configure the system purely through kernel command line options. > > I'm sure other people will find the functionality useful going forward > though and extend it to be triggered by DT/ACPI in the future. I'm totally against hacking in a kernel parameter for this. We'll need a proper documented DT or ACPI way. We also need to feed this information into the actual DMA bounce buffering decisions and not just the swiotlb placement.
