linux-kernel - Re: Question about iommu on x86

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Date:	Tue, 31 May 2011 16:34:33 +0100
From:	Daniel Haid <d.haid@...i.tv>
To:	Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@...cle.com>
Cc:	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>, <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Question about iommu on x86_64 and radeon driver.

> Noo.. It does, but the normal assumption of 'phys_to_virt' ==
> 'phys_to_bus' is
> not valid anymore. Think of a buffer (swiotlb) which has a pool
> of pages and when a PCI device wants a page, it hands one out. It 
> also has
> other functionality such as 'mapping' of an already allocated page. 
> If the
> PCI device asks the IOMMU (swiotlb) to map a page (and if you have
> 'swiotlb=force'
> the page provided has been allocated above 4GB and the device can 
> only handle
> up to 32-bit),

 Does the radeon driver allocate without DMA32, possibly above 4GB, ...

> then swiotlb gives out a page from its own pool. You now have
> two addresses: the one from the PCI pool (swiotlb) and the one you 
> already
> allocated.

 ... or does it allocate under 4GB but nevertheless get a page from
 the swiotlb pool?

> You are suppose to program your PCI card to read/write data to the
> page provided from the IOMMU (so the swiotlb), which means that it 
> won't
> write to the page you had allocated. Hence there are a calls, such as
> 'sync_page'..
> which will copy the contents from the swiotlb page to the one you had
> allocated
> (or vice-versa). This is called 'bounce buffer'.
>
> The radeon (and nouveau) don't have the code to call the 'sync_page', 
> and
> you wouldn't really want to do so - as it slows down the performance 
> of the
> machine. There exists another mechanism which is to allocate the 
> pages
> at the start, and not do mapping later one.

 Why can the radeon not simply allocate addresses under 4GB and not 
 request
 adresses from the iommu at all?

 I assume that if you request a page from the IOMMU, you are required to 
 do
 these sync_page calls (and that they get optimized away with a hardware 
 IOMMU?).

 So if the radeon uses the IOMMU but does not call sync_page even if 
 required to
 the code seems to be broken. If this is indeed the case would it not be 
 possible to
 simply add the sync_page calls for now (and thus fix the code), if it 
 is not
 difficult, and implement the method with more performance later?

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