Re: [PATCH 9/9] x86/iommu: use dma_ops_list in get_dma_ops

[Muli Ben-Yehuda <muli@il.ibm.com>]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 09:19:56AM +0200, Joerg Roedel wrote:

> > It might be possible to have a per-device slow or fast path, where
> > the fast path is for devices which have no DMA limitations
> > (high-end devices generally don't) and the slow path is for
> > devices which do.
> 
> This solves the problem with the DMA masks. But what happens to
> requests that cross guest page boundarys?

I'm not sure I follow. If a buffer is contiguous in the guest space,
it will remain contiguous (i.e., be mapped contiguously) in the IOMMU
I/O address space, even if each I/O PTE ends up mapping a different
physical frame.

> > > With mapping/unmapping through hypercalls we add the
> > > world-switch overhead to the copy-overhead. We can't avoid this
> > > when we have no hardware support at all. But already with older
> > > IOMMUs like Calgary and GART we can at least avoid the
> > > world-switch. And since, for example, every 64 bit capable AMD
> > > processor has a GART we can make use of it.
> > 
> > It should be possible to reduce the number and overhead of
> > hypercalls to the point where their cost is immaterial. I think
> > that's fundamentally a better approach.
> 
> Ok, we can queue map_sg allocations together an queue them into one
> hypercall. But I remember a paper from you where you wrote that most
> allocations are mapping only one area.

I'm afraid that bit of the paper was poorly done (mea culpa). As far
as I can recall, the majority of dma_alloc_coherent + scatter-gather
list *element* mappings only map a single frame, but we didn't look at
the time at the average length of a scatter gather list and the
frequency of sg list mappings vs. single page mappings. If the length
and frequency are high enough, and you map entire sg lists in a single
hcall or a single batch of hcalls, it might have a nice boost.

> Are there other ways to optimize this? I must say that reducing the
> number of hypercalls was important while thinking about my idea. If
> there are better ways I am all ears to hear from them.

There were a number of ideas mentioned in our paper (for example,
switching drivers from the streaming DMA API to the persistent DMA
API, which will be a big help to the scheme you propose), and Willman,
Rixner and Cox also had some input to the problem[1]. Unfortunately no
implementations exist yet AFAIK.

[1] "Protection Strategies for Direct Access to Virtualized I/O
Devices", by Paul Willmann, Scott Rixner and Alan L. Cox, USENIX '08.

Cheers,
Muli
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