Re: [PATCH v10 7/7] PCI: endpoint: pci-ep-msi: Add embedded doorbell fallback

[Niklas Cassel <cassel@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 10:59:26AM +0100, Niklas Cassel wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 05:49:13PM +0900, Koichiro Den wrote:
> > > 
> > > The transaction is a write from
> > > PCIe bus -> PCIe controller iATU -> internal bus -> IOMMU -> PCIe controller
> > > (the same controller as initiated the transaction).
> > 
> > Yes, I think we're on the same page about this path itself.
> > 
> > On my R-Car S4 setup, changing this to DMA_TO_DEVICE consistently triggers an
> > IOMMU fault, so at least on this platform the local path used for the doorbell
> > mapping is IOMMU-visible. That is the case this dma_map_resource() is intended
> > to cover.
> > 
> > For that path, my understanding is that the doorbell access ends up as a local
> > write on the EP side, so it needs write permission, hence DMA_FROM_DEVICE.
> > 
> > > Would be interesting why this is not working like normal (when using buffers):
> > > "For Networking drivers, it’s a rather simple affair.
> > > For transmit packets, map/unmap them with the DMA_TO_DEVICE direction specifier.
> > > For receive packets, just the opposite, map/unmap them with the DMA_FROM_DEVICE
> > > direction specifier."
> > 
> > I think the closer analogy is RX: the data comes from outside, but the device
> > writes to the target, so it needs write permission.
> 
> I think it is from the PoV from the IOMMU, is the transaction a Read by a device
> or a Write by a device?
> 
> For a NIC driver:
> For a RX packet, the data is coming from the device to the memory.
> device is doing a transaction to memory.
> For a TX packet, the data is going from the memory to the device.
> 
> In our case, the data is coming from the device, to a device.
> 
> Almost like a P2P DMA, but in our case, both devices are the same, so
> using the P2P DMA API like pci_p2pdma_add_resource() seems unnecessary.
> 
> So should it be DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL ? :)
> 
> I understand that for the R-Car S4 Spider IOMMU, it is sufficient to map
> it as DMA_FROM_DEVICE. I just want to be sure that on some other IOMMU,
> they might consider it sufficient to map this as DMA_TO_DEVICE (because
> it is also a transaction going to a device).
> 
> I just want to make sure that the code works on more than one IOMMU.
> 
> Perhaps some IOMMU experts could help chime in.
> 
> 
> Note that I am happy to merge the code as is, as it obviously works on the
> only platform that this has been tested on (R-Car S4 Spider), and if other
> platform tries to run this test case, if their IOMMU works differently, it
> will scream and they will report it to the list. So all good.
> 
> I'm mostly want to know how the DMA-API is supposed to be used in this
> specific scenario (device doing a write transaction to the same device).

I guess if a device will be reading or writing from this IOVA that is
created by IOMMU by the dma_map() call...

The device will only be writing to this IOVA.
The device will never be reading from the IOVA (since the physical address
is a register in the device itself, we will never supply this IOVA for the
device to read from).

DMA_FROM_DEVICE seems correct in all cases. DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL seems wrong
since the device will never read from this IOVA. Sorry for the noise.


Kind regards,
Niklas