On Tue, Aug 09, 2022 at 08:46:13AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > - the DMA streaming ops (dma_map_*) are only intended for short term > mappings, not for long living ones that can lead to starvation. > Especially with swiotlb, but also with some IOMMUs. I think this > needs to be changed to an API that can allocate DMA mapped memory > using dma_alloc_noncoherent/dma_alloc_noncontigious for the device > and then give access to that to the user instead I am a bit reluctant to require a new memory allocator to use the feature. I'm also generally not concerned about the odd resource constrained IOMMU. User space drivers pre-map all their memory resources up front, and this is essentially the same concept. For swiotlb, though, we can error out the mapping if the requested memory uses swiotlb with the device: the driver's .dma_map() can return ENOTSUPP if is_swiotlb_buffer() is true. Would that be more acceptable?
