Re: [RFC RESEND 00/16] Split IOMMU DMA mapping operation to two steps

Jason Gunthorpe
2024-03-06T17:44:58Z

On Wed, Mar 06, 2024 at 05:20:22PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 06, 2024 at 11:43:28AM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > I don't think they are so fundamentally different, at least in our
> > past conversations I never came out with the idea we should burden the
> > driver with two different flows based on what kind of alignment the
> > transfer happens to have.
>
> Then we talked past each other..

Well, we never talked to such detail

> > > So if we want to efficiently be able to handle these cases we need
> > > two APIs in the driver and a good framework to switch between them.
> >
> > But, what does the non-page-aligned version look like? Doesn't it
> > still look basically like this?
>
> I'd just rather have the non-aligned case for those who really need
> it be the loop over map single region that is needed for the direct
> mapping anyway.

There is a list of interesting cases this has to cover:

1. Direct map. No dma_addr_t at unmap, multiple HW SGLs
2. IOMMU aligned map, no P2P. Only IOVA range at unmap, single HW SGLs
3. IOMMU aligned map, P2P. Only IOVA range at unmap, multiple HW SGLs
4. swiotlb single range. Only IOVA range at unmap, single HW SGL
5. swiotlb multi-range. All dma_addr_t's at unmap, multiple HW SGLs.
6. Unaligned IOMMU. Only IOVA range at unmap, multiple HW SGLs

I think we agree that 1 and 2 should be optimized highly as they are
the common case. That mainly means no dma_addr_t storage in either

5 is the slowest and has the most overhead.

4 is basically the same as 2 from the driver's viewpoint

3 is quite similar to 1, but it has the IOVA range at unmap.

6 doesn't have to be optimal, from the driver perspective it can be
like 5

That is three basic driver flows 1/3, 2/4 and 5/6

So are you thinking something more like a driver flow of:

.. extent IO and get # aligned pages and know if there is P2P ..
dma_init_io(state, num_pages, p2p_flag)
if (dma_io_single_range(state)) {
// #2, #4
for each io()
dma_link_aligned_pages(state, io range)
hw_sgl = (state->iova, state->len)
} else {
// #1, #3, #5, #6
hw_sgls = alloc_hw_sgls(num_ios)
if (dma_io_needs_dma_addr_unmap(state))
dma_addr_storage = alloc_num_ios(); // #5 only
for each io()
hw_sgl[i] = dma_map_single(state, io range)
if (dma_addr_storage)
dma_addr_storage[i] = hw_sgl[i]; // #5 only
}

?

This is not quite what you said, we split the driver flow based on
needing 1 HW SGL vs need many HW SGL.

> > So are they really so different to want different APIs? That strikes
> > me as a big driver cost.
>
> To not have to store a dma_address range per CPU range that doesn't
> actually get used at all.

Right, that is a nice optimization we should reach for.

Jason