Hello,
This is an updated version of the patch series introducing a new features to DMA mapping subsystem to let drivers share the allocated buffers (preferably using recently introduced dma_buf framework) easy and efficient.
The first extension is DMA_ATTR_NO_KERNEL_MAPPING attribute. It is intended for use with dma_{alloc, mmap, free}_attrs functions. It can be used to notify dma-mapping core that the driver will not use kernel mapping for the allocated buffer at all, so the core can skip creating it. This saves precious kernel virtual address space. Such buffer can be accessed from userspace, after calling dma_mmap_attrs() for it (a typical use case for multimedia buffers). The value returned by dma_alloc_attrs() with this attribute should be considered as a DMA cookie, which needs to be passed to dma_mmap_attrs() and dma_free_attrs() funtions.
The second extension is required to let drivers to share the buffers allocated by DMA-mapping subsystem. Right now the driver gets a dma address of the allocated buffer and the kernel virtual mapping for it. If it wants to share it with other device (= map into its dma address space) it usually hacks around kernel virtual addresses to get pointers to pages or assumes that both devices share the DMA address space. Both solutions are just hacks for the special cases, which should be avoided in the final version of buffer sharing. To solve this issue in a generic way, a new call to DMA mapping has been introduced - dma_get_sgtable(). It allocates a scatter-list which describes the allocated buffer and lets the driver(s) to use it with other device(s) by calling dma_map_sg() on it.
The third extension solves the performance issues which we observed with some advanced buffer sharing use cases, which require creating a dma mapping for the same memory buffer for more than one device. From the DMA-mapping perspective this requires to call one of the dma_map_{page,single,sg} function for the given memory buffer a few times, for each of the devices. Each dma_map_* call performs CPU cache synchronization, what might be a time consuming operation, especially when the buffers are large. We would like to avoid any useless and time consuming operations, so that was the main reason for introducing another attribute for DMA-mapping subsystem: DMA_ATTR_SKIP_CPU_SYNC, which lets dma-mapping core to skip CPU cache synchronization in certain cases.
The proposed patches have been rebased on the latest Linux kernel v3.5-rc2 with 'ARM: replace custom consistent dma region with vmalloc' patches applied (for more information, please refer to the http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg179202.html thread).
The patches together with all dependences are also available on the following GIT branch:
git://git.linaro.org/people/mszyprowski/linux-dma-mapping.git 3.5-rc2-dma-ext-v2
Best regards Marek Szyprowski Samsung Poland R&D Center
Changelog:
v2: - rebased onto v3.5-rc2 and adapted for CMA and dma-mapping changes - renamed dma_get_sgtable() to dma_get_sgtable_attrs() to match the convention of the other dma-mapping calls with attributes - added generic fallback function for dma_get_sgtable() for architectures with simple dma-mapping implementations
v1: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/78644 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.cross-arch/14435 (part 2) - initial version
Patch summary:
Marek Szyprowski (6): common: DMA-mapping: add DMA_ATTR_NO_KERNEL_MAPPING attribute ARM: dma-mapping: add support for DMA_ATTR_NO_KERNEL_MAPPING attribute common: dma-mapping: introduce dma_get_sgtable() function ARM: dma-mapping: add support for dma_get_sgtable() common: DMA-mapping: add DMA_ATTR_SKIP_CPU_SYNC attribute ARM: dma-mapping: add support for DMA_ATTR_SKIP_CPU_SYNC attribute
Documentation/DMA-attributes.txt | 42 ++++++++++++++++++ arch/arm/common/dmabounce.c | 1 + arch/arm/include/asm/dma-mapping.h | 3 + arch/arm/mm/dma-mapping.c | 69 ++++++++++++++++++++++++------ drivers/base/dma-mapping.c | 18 ++++++++ include/asm-generic/dma-mapping-common.h | 18 ++++++++ include/linux/dma-attrs.h | 2 + include/linux/dma-mapping.h | 3 + 8 files changed, 142 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-)