Re: [PATCH v7 00/17] Provide a new two step DMA mapping API

Jason Gunthorpe
2025-03-19T17:58:42Z

On Fri, Mar 14, 2025 at 11:52:58AM +0100, Marek Szyprowski wrote:

> > The only way to do so is to use dma_map_sg_attrs(), which relies on SG
> > (the one that we want to remove) to map P2P pages.
>
> That's something I don't get yet. How P2P pages can be used with
> dma_map_sg_attrs(), but not with dma_map_page_attrs()? Both operate
> internally on struct page pointer.

It is a bit subtle, I ran in to this when exploring enabling proper
P2P for dma_map_resource() too.

The API signatures are:

dma_addr_t dma_map_page_attrs(struct device *dev, struct page *page,
size_t offset, size_t size, enum dma_data_direction dir,
unsigned long attrs);
void dma_unmap_page_attrs(struct device *dev, dma_addr_t addr, size_t size,
enum dma_data_direction dir, unsigned long attrs);

The thing to notice immediately is that the unmap path does not get
passed a struct page.

So, lets think about the flow when the iommu is turned on.

For normal struct page memory:

- dma_map_page_attrs() allocates some IOVA and returns it in the
dma_addr_t and then maps the struct page to the iommu page table

- dma_unmap_page_attrs() frees the IOVA from the given dma_addr_t

If we think about P2P now:

- dma_map_page_attrs() can inspect the struct page and determine it
is P2P. It computes a bus address which is not an IOVA, and does
not transit through the IOMMU. No IOVA allocation is performed. the
bus address is returned as the dma_addr_t

- dma_unmap_page_attrs() ... is impossible. We just get this
dma_addr_t that doesn't have enough information to tell anymore if
the address is a P2P bus address or not, so we can't tell if we
should unmap an iova from the dma_addr_t :\

The sg path fixes this because it introduced a new flag in the
scatterlist, SG_DMA_BUS_ADDRESS, that allows the sg map path to record
the information for the unmap path so it can do the right thing.

Leon's approach fixes this by putting an overarching transaction state
around the DMA operation so that map and unmap operations can look in
the state and determine if this is a P2P or non P2P map and then know
how to unmap.

For some background here, Christoph gave me this idea back at LSF/MM
in Vancouver (two years ago now). At the time I was looking at
replacing scatterlist and giving new DMA API ops to operate on a
"scatterlist v2" structure.

Christoph's vision was to make a performance DMA API path that could
be used to implement any scatterlist-like data structure very
efficiently without having to teach the DMA API about all sorts of
scatterlist-like things.

Jason