Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] crypto: add CRYPTO_TFM_REQ_DMA flag

["Horia Geantă" <horia.geanta@nxp.com>]

On 11/26/2020 9:09 AM, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 22:39, Iuliana Prodan <iuliana.prodan@nxp.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 11/25/2020 11:16 PM, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>>> On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 22:14, Iuliana Prodan (OSS)
>>> <iuliana.prodan@oss.nxp.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> From: Iuliana Prodan <iuliana.prodan@nxp.com>
>>>>
>>>> Add the option to allocate the crypto request object plus any extra space
>>>> needed by the driver into a DMA-able memory.
>>>>
>>>> Add CRYPTO_TFM_REQ_DMA flag to be used by backend implementations to
>>>> indicate to crypto API the need to allocate GFP_DMA memory
>>>> for private contexts of the crypto requests.
>>>>
>>>
>>> These are always directional DMA mappings, right? So why can't we use
>>> bounce buffering here?
>>>
>> The idea was to avoid allocating any memory in crypto drivers.
>> We want to be able to use dm-crypt with CAAM, which needs DMA-able
>> memory and increasing reqsize is not enough.
> 
> But what does 'needs DMA-able memory' mean? DMA operations are
> asynchronous by definition, and so the DMA layer should be able to
> allocate bounce buffers when needed. This will cost some performance
> in cases where the hardware cannot address all of memory directly, but
> this is a consequence of the design, and I don't think we should
> burden the generic API with this.
> 
The performance loss due to bounce buffering is non-negligible.
Previous experiments we did showed a 35% gain (when forcing all data,
including I/O buffers, in ZONE_DMA32).

I don't have the exact numbers for bounce buffering introduced by allowing
only by the control data structures (descriptors etc.) in high memory,
but I don't think it's fair to easily dismiss this topic,
given the big performance drop and relatively low impact
on the generic API.

Thanks,
Horia