Re: [RFC PATCH 00/28] Removing struct page from P2PDMA

Jason Gunthorpe
2019-06-24T13:46:41Z

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 09:31:26AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 04:33:53PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > My primary concern with this is that ascribes a level of generality
> > > that just isn't there for peer-to-peer dma operations. "Peer"
> > > addresses are not "DMA" addresses, and the rules about what can and
> > > can't do peer-DMA are not generically known to the block layer.
> >
> > ?? The P2P infrastructure produces a DMA bus address for the
> > initiating device that is is absolutely a DMA address. There is some
> > intermediate CPU centric representation, but after mapping it is the
> > same as any other DMA bus address.
> >
> > The map function can tell if the device pair combination can do p2p or
> > not.
>
> At the PCIe level there is no such thing as a DMA address, it all
> is bus address with MMIO and DMA in the same address space (without
> that P2P would have not chance of actually working obviously). But
> that bus address space is different per "bus" (which would be an
> root port in PCIe), and we need to be careful about that.

Sure, that is how dma_addr_t is supposed to work - it is always a
device specific value that can be used only by the device that it was
created for, and different devices could have different dma_addr_t
values for the same memory.

So when Logan goes and puts dma_addr_t into the block stack he must
also invert things so that the DMA map happens at the start of the
process to create the right dma_addr_t early.

I'm not totally clear if this series did that inversion, if it didn't
then it should not be using the dma_addr_t label at all, or refering
to anything as a 'dma address' as it is just confusing.

BTW, it is not just offset right? It is possible that the IOMMU can
generate unique dma_addr_t values for each device?? Simple offset is
just something we saw in certain embedded cases, IIRC.

Jason