Re: Enabling peer to peer device transactions for PCIe devices

Christian König
2016-11-25T13:06:21Z

Am 24.11.2016 um 18:55 schrieb Logan Gunthorpe:
> Hey,
>
> On 24/11/16 02:45 AM, Christian König wrote:
>> E.g. it can happen that PCI device A exports it's BAR using ZONE_DEVICE.
>> Not PCI device B (a SATA device) can directly read/write to it because
>> it is on the same bus segment, but PCI device C (a network card for
>> example) can't because it is on a different bus segment and the bridge
>> can't handle P2P transactions.
> Yeah, that could be an issue but in our experience we have yet to see
> it. We've tested with two separate PCI buses on different CPUs connected
> through QPI links and it works fine. (It is rather slow but I understand
> Intel has improved the bottleneck in newer CPUs than the ones we tested.)

Well Serguei send me a couple of documents about QPI when we started to
discuss this internally as well and that's exactly one of the cases I
had in mind when writing this.

If I understood it correctly for such systems P2P is technical possible,
but not necessary a good idea. Usually it is faster to just use a
bouncing buffer when the peers are a bit "father" apart.

That this problem is solved on newer hardware is good, but doesn't helps
us at all if we at want to support at least systems from the last five
years or so.

> It may just be older hardware that has this issue. I expect that as long
> as a failed transfer can be handled gracefully by the initiator I don't
> see a need to predetermine whether a device can see another devices memory.

I don't want to predetermine whether a device can see another devices
memory at get_user_pages() time.

My thinking was more going into the direction of a whitelist to figure
out during dma_map_single()/dma_map_sg() time if we should use a
bouncing buffer or not.

Christian.

>
>
> Logan