[RFC v2 1/2] dma-buf: Introduce dma buffer sharing mechanism

Daniel Vetter
2011-12-05T18:55:44Z

On Mon, Dec 05, 2011 at 05:18:48PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Friday 02 December 2011, Sumit Semwal wrote:
> > + /* allow allocator to take care of cache ops */
> > + void (*sync_sg_for_cpu) (struct dma_buf *, struct device *);
> > + void (*sync_sg_for_device)(struct dma_buf *, struct device *);
>
> I don't see how this works with multiple consumers: For the streaming
> DMA mapping, there must be exactly one owner, either the device or
> the CPU. Obviously, this rule needs to be extended when you get to
> multiple devices and multiple device drivers, plus possibly user
> mappings. Simply assigning the buffer to "the device" from one
> driver does not block other drivers from touching the buffer, and
> assigning it to "the cpu" does not stop other hardware that the
> code calling sync_sg_for_cpu is not aware of.
>
> The only way to solve this that I can think of right now is to
> mandate that the mappings are all coherent (i.e. noncachable
> on noncoherent architectures like ARM). If you do that, you no
> longer need the sync_sg_for_* calls.

Woops, totally missed the addition of these. Can somebody explain to used
to rather coherent x86 what we need these for and the code-flow would look
like in a typical example. I was kinda assuming that devices would bracket
their use of a buffer with the attachment_map/unmap calls and any cache
coherency magic that might be needed would be somewhat transparent to
users of the interface?

The map call gets the dma_data_direction parameter, so it should be able
to do the right thing. And because we keep the attachement around, any
caching of mappings should be possible, too.

Yours, Daniel

PS: Slightly related, because it will make the coherency nightmare worse,
afaict: Can we kill mmap support?
--
Daniel Vetter
Mail: daniel at ffwll.ch
Mobile: +41 (0)79 365 57 48