Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] drm: msm: Replace dma_map_sg with dma_sync_sg*

From: Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch>
To: Rob Clark <robdclark@gmail.com>
Cc: Vivek Gautam <vivek.gautam@codeaurora.org>,
	David Airlie <airlied@linux.ie>,
	linux-arm-msm <linux-arm-msm@vger.kernel.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	dri-devel <dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org>,
	Tomasz Figa <tfiga@chromium.org>,
	Sean Paul <seanpaul@chromium.org>,
	Marek Szyprowski <m.szyprowski@samsung.com>,
	freedreno <freedreno@lists.freedesktop.org>,
	hch@lst.de, Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@arm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] drm: msm: Replace dma_map_sg with dma_sync_sg*
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2018 10:40:02 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20181130094002.GS21184@phenom.ffwll.local> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAF6AEGsT9RO2RmgBTa0HQRjRUiRKy9N3vQxvD7RVWp4HpnWn+w@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 01:57:38PM -0500, Rob Clark wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 12:24 PM Tomasz Figa <tfiga@chromium.org> wrote:
> >
> > [CC Marek]
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 9:09 AM Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 5:57 PM Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Note that one thing I'd like to avoid is exposing these funtions directly
> > > > to drivers, as that will get us into all kinds of abuses.
> > >
> > > What kind of abuse do you expect? It could very well be that gpu folks
> > > call that "standard use case" ... At least on x86 with the i915 driver
> > > we pretty much rely on architectural guarantees for how cache flushes
> > > work very much. Down to userspace doing the cache flushing for
> > > mappings the kernel has set up.
> >
> > i915 is a very specific case of a fully contained,
> > architecture-specific hardware subsystem, where you can just hardcode
> > all integration details inside the driver, because nobody else would
> > care.
> >
> > In ARM world, you can have the same IP blocks licensed by multiple SoC
> > vendors with different integration details and that often includes the
> > option of coherency.
> 
> fwiw, I believe all the GPU IP blocks that are used across multiple
> SoCs have their own GPU MMU (potentially in addition to an iommu?).
> So the dma-api is a much better fit for them..  drm/msm is a lot
> closer to drm/i915 scenario, so I don't so much care if the solution
> to our unique problem isn't something that would work for other
> drivers ;-)

Right now maybe, but I fully except the entire coherent vs. non-coherent
transactions hilarity that we have on the bigger intel socs since a few
years already to trickle down into smaller (arm based socs) eventually. I
think Apple is already there since a few generations.

So maybe we won't have to fight the iommu side of the dma-api anymore
on these, but we'll still have to fight the cache maintenance side of
dma-api. You can tell the dma-api to not flush, but then you don't have
any other way to actually flush that's acceptable for arch/arm (on x86 we
just run clflush in userspace and call it a day).
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch
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