Re: PCI DMA to small buffers on cache-incoherent arch

David S. Miller
2002-06-09T05:32:51Z

From: Roland Dreier <roland@topspin.com>
Date: 08 Jun 2002 18:26:12 -0700

Just to make sure I'm reading this correctly, you're saying that as
long as a buffer is OK for DMA, it should be OK to use a
sub-cache-line chunk as a DMA buffer via pci_map_single(), and
accessing the rest of the cache line should be OK at any time before,
during and after the DMA.

Yes.

David> This means what MIPS is doing is wrong. For partial
David> cacheline bits it can't do the invalidate thing.

If I understand you, this means non-cache-coherent PPC is wrong as
well -- pci_map_single() goes through consistent_sync() and turns
into:

case PCI_DMA_FROMDEVICE: /* invalidate only */
invalidate_dcache_range(start, end);
break;

What alternate implementation are you proposing?

For non-cacheline aligned chunks in the range "start" to "end" you
must perform a cache writeback and invalidate. To preserve the data
outside of the DMA range.