Hi Christoph,
On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 06:09:17PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Add a new API that returns a virtually non-contigous array of pages
> and dma address. This API is only implemented for dma-iommu and will
> not be implemented for non-iommu DMA API instances that have to allocate
> contiguous memory. It is up to the caller to check if the API is
> available.
Would you mind scheding some more light on what made the previous attempt
not work well? I liked the previous API because it was more consistent with
the regular dma_alloc_coherent().
>
> The intent is that media drivers can use this API if either:
FWIW, the USB subsystem also has similar needs, and so do some DRM drivers
using DMA API rather than IOMMU API directly. Basically I believe that all
the users removed in your previous series relied on custom downstream
patches to make DMA_ATTR_NON_CONSISTENT work and could be finally made work
in upstream using this API.
>
> - no kernel mapping or only temporary kernel mappings are required.
> That is as a better replacement for DMA_ATTR_NO_KERNEL_MAPPING
> - a kernel mapping is required for cached and DMA mapped pages, but
> the driver also needs the pages to e.g. map them to userspace.
> In that sense it is a replacement for some aspects of the recently
> removed and never fully implemented DMA_ATTR_NON_CONSISTENT
What's the expected allocation and mapping flow with the latter? Would that be
pages = dma_alloc_noncoherent(...)
vaddr = vmap(pages, ...);
?
Would one just use the usual dma_sync_for_{cpu,device}() for cache
invallidate/clean, while keeping the mapping in place?
Best regards,
Tomasz
