At Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:58:08 -0500, James Bottomley wrote: > > On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 18:53 +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote: > > > I'm afraid there are several problems. The first is that it doesn't do > > > what you want. You can't map a coherent page to userspace (which is at > > > a non congruent address on parisc) and still expect it to be > > > coherent ... there's going to have to be fiddling with the page table > > > caches to make sure coherency isn't destroyed by aliasing effects > > > > Hmm... how bad would be the coherency with such a simple mmap method? > > In most cases, we don't need the "perfect" coherency. Usually one > > process mmaps the whole buffer and keep reading/writing. There is > > another use case (sharing the mmapped buffer by multiple processes), > > but this can be disabled if we know it's not feasible beforehand. > > Unfortunately, the incoherency is between the user and the kernel. > That's where the aliasing effects occur, so realistically, even though > you've mapped coherent memory to the user, the coherency of that memory > is only device <-> kernel. When the any single user space process > writes to it, the device won't see the write unless the user issues a > flush. I see. In the case of ALSA mmap mode, a user issues an ioctl to notify after the read/write access, so it'd be relatively easy to add a sync operation. Does the call of dma_sync_*_for_device() suffice for that purpose? (BTW, how does the fb driver work on this?) Thanks! Takashi
