On Fri, Feb 07, 2020 at 02:24:57PM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > Many systems can now support direct DMA between two PCI devices, for > instance between a RDMA NIC and a NVMe CMB, or a RDMA NIC and GPU > graphics memory. In many system architectures this peer-to-peer PCI-E > DMA transfer is critical to achieving performance as there is simply > not enough system memory/PCI-E bandwidth for data traffic to go > through the CPU socket. > > For many years various out of tree solutions have existed to serve > this need. Recently some components have been accpeted into mainline, > such as the p2pdma system, which allows co-operating drivers to setup > P2P DMA transfers at the PCI level. This has allowed some kernel P2P > DMA transfers related to NVMe CMB and RDMA to become supported. > > A major next step is to enable P2P transfers under userspace > control. This is a very broad topic, but for this session I propose to > focus on initial cases of supporting drivers can setup a P2P transfer > from a PCI BAR page mmap'd to userspace. This is the basic starting > point for future discussions on how to adapt get_user_pages() IO paths > (ie O_DIRECT, net zero copy TX, RDMA, etc) to support PCI BAR memory. > > As all current drivers doing DMA from user space must go through > get_user_pages() (or its new sibling hmm_range_fault()), some > extension of the get_user_pages() API is needed to allow drivers > supporting P2P to see the pages. > > get_user_pages() will require some 'struct page' and 'struct > vm_area_struct' representation of the BAR memory beyond what today's > io_remap_pfn_range()/etc produces. > > This topic has been discussed in small groups in various conferences > over the last year, (plumbers, ALPSS, LSF/MM 2019, etc). Having a > larger group together would be productive, especially as the direction > has a notable impact on the general mm. > > For patch sets, we've seen a number of attempts so far, but little has > been merged yet. Common elements of past discussions have been: > - Building struct page for BAR memory > - Stuffing BAR memory into scatter/gather lists, bios and skbs > - DMA mapping BAR memory > - Referencing BAR memory without a struct page > - Managing lifetime of BAR memory across multiple drivers > > Based on past work, the people in the CC list would be recommended > participants: > > Christian König <christian.koenig@xxxxxxx> > Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@xxxxxxxx> > Logan Gunthorpe <logang@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > Stephen Bates <sbates@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > Jérôme Glisse <jglisse@xxxxxxxxxx> > Ira Weiny <iweiny@xxxxxxxxx> > Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> > John Hubbard <jhubbard@xxxxxxxxxx> > Ralph Campbell <rcampbell@xxxxxxxxxx> > Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> > Don Dutile <ddutile@xxxxxxxxxx> That's a long list, and you're missing "Thomas Hellström (VMware)" <thomas_os@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Joao Martins <joao.m.martins@xxxxxxxxxx> both of whom have been working on related projects (for PFNs without pages). Hey, you missed me too! ;-)