linux-kernel - Re: dma coherent memory user-space maps

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Date:   Mon, 4 Nov 2019 07:38:44 +0100
From:   Thomas Hellström (VMware) 
        <thomas_os@...pmail.org>
To:     Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>
Cc:     Christian König <christian.koenig@....com>,
        "linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: dma coherent memory user-space maps

Hi, Crhistoph,

On 10/31/19 10:54 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> sorry for the delay.  I've been travelling way to much laterly and had
> a hard time keeping up.
>
> On Tue, Oct 08, 2019 at 02:34:17PM +0200, Thomas Hellström (VMware) wrote:
>> /* Obtain struct dma_pfn pointers from a dma coherent allocation */
>> int dma_get_dpfns(struct device *dev, void *cpu_addr, dma_addr_t dma_addr,
>>            pgoff_t offset, pgoff_t num, dma_pfn_t dpfns[]);
>>
>> I figure, for most if not all architectures we could use an ordinary pfn as
>> dma_pfn_t, but the dma layer would still have control over how those pfns
>> are obtained and how they are used in the kernel's mapping APIs.
>>
>> If so, I could start looking at this, time permitting,  for the cases where
>> the pfn can be obtained from the kernel address or from
>> arch_dma_coherent_to_pfn(), and also the needed work to have a tailored
>> vmap_pfn().
> I'm not sure that infrastructure is all that helpful unfortunately, even
> if it ended up working.  The problem with the 'coherent' DMA mappings
> is that we they have a few different backends.  For architectures that
> are DMA coherent everything is easy and we use the normal page
> allocator, and your above is trivially doable as wrappers around the
> existing functionality.  Other remap ptes to be uncached, either
> in-place or using vmap, and the remaining ones use weird special
> allocators for which almost everything we can mormally do in the VM
> will fail.

Hmm, yes I was hoping one could hide that behind the dma_pfn_t and the 
interface, so that non-trivial backends would be able to define the 
dma_pfn_t as needed and also if needed have their own special 
implementation of the interface functions. The interface was spec'ed 
from the user's (TTM) point of view assuming that with a page-prot and 
an opaque dma_pfn_t we'd be able to support most non-trivial backends, 
but that's perhaps not the case?

>
> I promised Christian an uncached DMA allocator a while ago, and still
> haven't finished that either unfortunately.  But based on looking at
> the x86 pageattr code I'm now firmly down the road of using the
> set_memory_* helpers that change the pte attributes in place, as
> everything else can't actually work on x86 which doesn't allow
> aliasing of PTEs with different caching attributes.  The arm64 folks
> also would prefer in-place remapping even if they don't support it
> yet, and that is something the i915 code already does in a somewhat
> hacky way, and something the msm drm driver wants.  So I decided to
> come up with an API that gives back 'coherent' pages on the
> architectures that support it and otherwise just fail.
>
> Do you care about architectures other than x86 and arm64?  If not I'll
> hopefully have something for you soon.

For VMware we only care about x86 and arm64, but i think Christian needs 
to fill in here.

Thanks,

Thomas