Re: [PATCH] mips: Add dma_mmap_coherent()

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:20:52 +0100,
Ralf Baechle wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:58:08PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 18:53 +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > > > I'm afraid there are several problems.  The first is that it doesn't do
> > > > what you want.  You can't map a coherent page to userspace (which is at
> > > > a non congruent address on parisc) and still expect it to be
> > > > coherent ... there's going to have to be fiddling with the page table
> > > > caches to make sure coherency isn't destroyed by aliasing effects
> > > 
> > > Hmm...  how bad would be the coherency with such a simple mmap method?
> > > In most cases, we don't need the "perfect" coherency.  Usually one
> > > process mmaps the whole buffer and keep reading/writing.  There is
> > > another use case (sharing the mmapped buffer by multiple processes),
> > > but this can be disabled if we know it's not feasible beforehand.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, the incoherency is between the user and the kernel.
> > That's where the aliasing effects occur, so realistically, even though
> > you've mapped coherent memory to the user, the coherency of that memory
> > is only device <-> kernel.  When the any single user space process
> > writes to it, the device won't see the write unless the user issues a
> > flush.
> 
> Same applied on MIPS.  Some platforms have the additional requirement that
> the buffer must not be mapped by the TLB during the DMA operation or bad
> things could happen.

Well, in the case of audio hardware, the DMA is always running as long
as the stream is running.  So, on such platforms, the usual mappings
are not allowed at all during audio streaming?


Takashi