linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/2] scatterlist: use sg

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Message-ID: <20150610171304.GQ7557@n2100.arm.linux.org.uk>
Date:	Wed, 10 Jun 2015 18:13:04 +0100
From:	Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@....linux.org.uk>
To:	Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>
Cc:	Joerg Roedel <joro@...tes.org>, Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>,
	Michal Simek <monstr@...str.eu>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Julia Lawall <Julia.Lawall@...6.fr>,
	"dmaengine@...r.kernel.org" <dmaengine@...r.kernel.org>,
	David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>,
	"linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org" 
	<linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] scatterlist: use sg_phys()

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 09:57:06AM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Russell King - ARM Linux
> <linux@....linux.org.uk> wrote:
> > Why?  The aim of the code is not to detect whether the address is aligned
> > to a page (if it were, it'd be testing for a zero s->offset, or it would
> > be testing for an s->offset being a multiple of the page size.
> >
> > Let's first understand the code that's being modified (which seems to be
> > something which isn't done very much today - people seem to just like
> > changing code for the hell of it.)
> >
> >         for (count = 0, s = sg; count < (size >> PAGE_SHIFT); s = sg_next(s)) {
> >                 phys_addr_t phys = page_to_phys(sg_page(s));
> >                 unsigned int len = PAGE_ALIGN(s->offset + s->length);
> >
> >                 if (!is_coherent &&
> >                         !dma_get_attr(DMA_ATTR_SKIP_CPU_SYNC, attrs))
> >                         __dma_page_cpu_to_dev(sg_page(s), s->offset, s->length,
> > dir);
> >
> >                 prot = __dma_direction_to_prot(dir);
> >
> >                 ret = iommu_map(mapping->domain, iova, phys, len, prot);
> >                 if (ret < 0)
> >                         goto fail;
> >                 count += len >> PAGE_SHIFT;
> >                 iova += len;
> >         }
> >
> > What it's doing is trying to map each scatterlist entry via an IOMMU.
> > Unsurprisingly, IOMMUs are page based - you can't map a partial IOMMU
> > page.
> >
> > However, what says that the IOMMU page size is the same as the host CPU
> > page size - it may not be... so the above code is wrong for a completely
> > different reason.
> >
> > What we _should_ be doing is finding out what the IOMMU minimum page
> > size is, and using that in conjunction with the sg_phys() of the
> > scatterlist entry to determine the start and length of the mapping
> > such that the IOMMU mapping covers the range described by the scatterlist
> > entry.  (iommu_map() takes arguments which must be aligned to the IOMMU
> > minimum page size.)
> >
> > However, what we can also see from the above is that we have other code
> > here using sg_page() - which is a necessity to be able to perform the
> > required DMA cache maintanence to ensure that the data is visible to the
> > DMA device.  We need to kmap_atomic() these in order to flush them, and
> > there's no other way other than struct page to represent a highmem page.
> >
> > So, I think your intent to want to remove struct page from the I/O
> > subsystem is a false hope, unless you want to end up rewriting lots of
> > architecture code, and you can come up with an alternative method to
> > represent highmem pages.
> 
> I think there will always be cases that need to do pfn_to_page() for
> buffer management.  Those configurations will be blocked from seeing
> cases where a pfn is not struct page backed.  So, you can have highmem
> or dma to pmem, but not both.  Christoph, this is why I have Kconfig
> symbols (DEV_PFN etc) to gate whether an arch/config supports pfn-only
> i/o.

Hmm, pmem... yea, in the SolidRun community, we've basically decided to
stick with my updated Marvell BMM layer rather than switch to pmem.  I
forget the reasons why, but the decision was made after looking at what
pmem was doing...

In any case, let's not get bogged down in a peripheral issue.

What I'm objecting to is that the patches I've seen seem to be just
churn without any net benefit.

You can't simply make sg_page() return NULL after this change, because
you've done nothing with the remaining sg_page() callers to allow them
to gracefully handle that case.

What I'd like to see is a much fuller series of patches which show the
whole progression towards your end goal rather than a piecemeal
approach.  Right now, it's not clear that there is any benefit to
this round of changes.

-- 
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