On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 04:25:46PM +0100, Pavel Begunkov wrote:
The patch set allows to register a dmabuf to an io_uring instance for a specified file and use it with io_uring read / write requests. The infrastructure is not tied to io_uring and there could be more users in the future. A similar idea was attempted some years ago by Keith [1], from where I borrowed a good number of changes, and later was brough up by Tushar and Vishal from Intel.
It's an opt-in feature for files, and they need to implement a new file operation to use it. Only NVMe block devices are supported in this series. The user API is built on top of io_uring's "registered buffers", where a dmabuf is registered in a special way, but after it can be used as any other "registered buffer" with IORING_OP_{READ,WRITE}_FIXED requests. It's created via a new file operation and the resulted map is then passed through the I/O stack in a new iterator type. There is some additional infrastructure to bind it all, which also counts requests using a dmabuf map and managing lifetimes, which is used to implement map invalidation.
It was tested for GPU <-> NVMe transfers. Also, as it maintains a long-term dma mapping, it helps with the IOMMU cost. The numbers below are for udmabuf reads previously run by Anuj for different IOMMU modes:
Plain registered buffer is long-live too, which raises question: does this framework need to take it into account from beginning?
BTW, inspired by this approach, I adds similar feature to ublk via UBLK_IO_F_SHMEM_ZC which can maintain long-term vfio dma mapping over registered user-place aligned buffer.
Thanks, Ming