Re: [PATCH v2 4/7] dma: of: introduce of_dma_is_coherent() helper

[Rob Herring <robherring2-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

Adding Will...

On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 9:24 AM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd-r2nGTMty4D4@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Friday 28 February 2014 09:14:19 Rob Herring wrote:
>>
>> I know Will D was not a fan of this property. Primarily I believe
>> because you may need to describe more than just a boolean in more
>> complex bus topologies.
>
> I can't think of any example where it's not per-device. Do you
> think we can end up with a device that has multiple bus master
> ports, only some of which are coherent, or is there a different
> concern?

Perhaps Will can post his slides from the ARM kernel summit or chime
in here, but I believe it was more that coherency is just one aspect
of bus master bus topology. The DT models the slave bus hierarchy and
doesn't model the master side which is becoming more complex and
needing to be described. In the case of highbank, you have an ACP bus
with some number of masters on it. They are configurable, but it is
not the device that is configurable, but really which bus they are
connected to.

>
>> Effectively, highbank is always coherent. It was only PCI that is
>> non-coherent, but I can safely say PCI will never be enabled at this
>> point. There are no designs with PCI beyond 1 or 2 validation boards
>> (total boards, not designs), and getting PCI to work was quite hacky
>> due to only a 1MB window. The other masters are programmable, but only
>> the coherent path is used as the non-coherent path actually has some
>> issues. I had expected the opposite believing the ACP port would
>> actually have issues which is also why I made it configurable.
>
> Ok, I see. I still expect that we will see systems that are only
> partially coherent in the future, but it's good to know we don't really
> have to deal with backwards-compatibility as long as we can just
> hardcode highbank to be always coherent.
>
> I'm especially thankful we don't have to deal with the PCI implementation.

Yeah, you and me both.

Rob
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