Date:	Wed, 5 Oct 2011 11:14:59 -0700
From:	"Williams, Dan J" <dan.j.williams@...el.com>
To:	Jassi Brar <jaswinder.singh@...aro.org>
Cc:	Russell King <rmk@....linux.org.uk>,
	Barry Song <21cnbao@...il.com>,
	Vinod Koul <vinod.koul@...el.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	DL-SHA-WorkGroupLinux <workgroup.linux@....com>,
	Dave Jiang <dave.jiang@...el.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCHv4] DMAEngine: Define interleaved transfer request api

On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Jassi Brar <jaswinder.singh@...aro.org> wrote:
> On 3 October 2011 21:43, Russell King <rmk@....linux.org.uk> wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 11:54:23AM +0530, Jassi Brar wrote:
>>> On 2 October 2011 06:03, Barry Song <21cnbao@...il.com> wrote:
>>> > 2011/10/2 Jassi Brar <jaswinder.singh@...aro.org>
>>>
>>> >> > For example, it can't use
>>> >> > MEM_TO_MEM to map, it still need to know whether the memory is source
>>> >> > or dest.
>>> >> MEM_TO_MEM means "From Memory Source To Memory Destination"
>>> >>  Map Src buffer with DMA_TO_DEVICE and Dst buffer with DMA_FROM_DEVICE
>>> >>
>>> >> MEM_TO_DEV means "From Memory Source To FIFO Destination"
>>> >>  Map Src buffer with DMA_TO_DEVICE.
>>> >>
>>> >> DEV_TO_MEM means "From FIFO Source To Memory Destination"
>>> >>  Map Dst buffer with DMA_FROM_DEVICE
>>> >>
>>> >> DEV_TO_DEV means "From FIFO Source To FIFO Destination"
>>> >>
>>> >> What else would you want to know ?
>>> >
>>> > that is the problem. for example, drivers can't use MEM_TO_MEM as a
>>> > flag to do dma mapping. so xfer_direction can't cover all that
>>> > dma_data_direction can do.  that's why you need both
>>> > dma_data_direction and xfer_direction with some similar flags in them.
>>> >
>>> The client drivers map the src/dst buffers and the dmac driver unmaps
>>> them by default(!). For which, the dmac driver doesn't look at anything
>>> other than
>>>      DMA_COMPL_SKIP_SRC/DST_UNMAP
>>>      DMA_COMPL_SRC/DST_UNMAP_SINGLE
>>>   bits of 'enum dma_ctrl_flags'.
>>> For this unmap'ing purpose, the usage of dma_data_direction is already
>>> internal to the dmac driver.
>>
>> No.  Slave DMA engine drivers do *not* (and if they do, they should *not*)
>> honour the unmapping of submitted buffers.
>>
>> The unmapping of these buffers by the DMA engine driver is intended to be
>> done for the async_tx API and not slave DMA.
>>
> The proposed api is usable by both Slave as well as Async(Memcpy etc).
> So it *does* matter here.

Support for automatic unmapping is really only useful for simple cases
like net_dma where all operations in the chain are to distinct
buffers.  Trying to support it for async_tx contributed to the current
brokenness with respect to overlapping mappings for operation chaining
in the async-tx raid case.  So I would like to rip out unmap support
from the dma drivers, but before we can do that we need to teach raid
and net_dma how to manage the mappings themselves.  The raid lift is a
bit bigger because it needs to handle the cases of cpu-memcpy +
dma-xor-pq versus dma-memcpy + dma-xor-pq (I would drop support for
dma-memcpy + cpu-xor-pq and just make this case all cpu).

This new operation type strikes me as being in a similar vein to
commit a08abd8c "async_tx: structify submission arguments, add
scribble", in that we convert multiple submission arguments into one
description template.  With some tweaks it could probably even cover
the DMA_CYCLIC, but probably could not cover the raid ops.  In general
I'm concerned about operation type proliferation, so if we added this
one I'd like to see others removed.
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