pci: let devices flush DMA to host memory
cover pci: let devices flush DMA to host memory
On Altix, DMA may be reordered within the NUMA interconnect. This can be a problem with Infiniband, where DMA to Completion Queues can race with data DMA. This patchset allows a driver to associate a memory region with a "dmaflush" attribute, so that writes to the memory region flush in-flight DMA, preventing the CQ/data race.
There are three patches in this set:
[1/3]: add pci_dma_flags_set_dmaflush() to pci interface [2/3]: redefine pci_dma_flags_set_dmaflush() for sn-ia64 [3/3]: document pci_dma_flags_set_dmaflush()
And there would be additional patches to IB drivers to make use of the interface, of course.
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Arthur
Quoted 7 lines · On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 11:02:32AM -0700, [email protected] wrote:
On Altix, DMA may be reordered within the NUMA interconnect. This can be a problem with Infiniband, where DMA to Completion Queues can race with data DMA. This patchset allows a driver to associate a memory region with a "dmaflush" attribute, so that writes to the memory region flush in-flight DMA, preventing the CQ/data race.
FYI to linux-pci folks
This patch had previous discussion on LKML:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/17/336
James Bottomley at one point obliquely referred to my OLS2003 paper: "DMA Hints on ia64/PARISC"
After reading the thread, my take is we need a more elegant way for a device driver to handle registration of DMA regions allocated by user space. The API would "make this page/region act like dma_alloc_coherent()". That implies strong ordering between CPU and DMA to/from the device. Maybe the code is the right thing and I want a name that makes sense in the context of current DMA API.
On IRC, willy suggested an mmap() flag and that sounds reasonable too though I don't know if it's feasible.
hth,
grant
Quoted 11 lines
There are three patches in this set:
[1/3]: add pci_dma_flags_set_dmaflush() to pci interface [2/3]: redefine pci_dma_flags_set_dmaflush() for sn-ia64 [3/3]: document pci_dma_flags_set_dmaflush()And there would be additional patches to IB drivers to make use of the interface, of course.
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Arthur
Quoted 7 lines · Grant Grundler
.....
After reading the thread, my take is we need a more elegant way for a device driver to handle registration of DMA regions allocated by user space. The API would "make this page/region act likedma_alloc_coherent()". That implies strong ordering between CPU and DMA to/from the device. Maybe the code is the right thing and I want a name that makes sense in the context of current DMA API.
Need to think about this...
Quoted 4 lines
On IRC, willy suggested an
mmap()flag and that sounds reasonable too though I don't know if it's feasible.
Yeah, we're doing something like this now as a band-aid solution. Not a flag to mmap(), but a magic offset value. But it wasn't acceptable to the maintainer of the mthca IB driver (Roland Dreier), hence the new proposal....
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Arthur