On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 01:27:19PM +0100, Marek Szyprowski wrote:

The first issue we identified is the fact that on some platform (again,
mainly ARM) there are several functions for allocating DMA buffers:
dma_alloc_coherent, dma_alloc_writecombine and dma_alloc_noncoherent

Is this write-combining from the point of view of the device (ie iommu),
or from the point of view of the CPU, or both?

The next step in dma mapping framework update is the introduction of
dma_mmap/dma_mmap_attrs() function. There are a number of drivers
(mainly V4L2 and ALSA) that only exports the DMA buffers to user space.
Creating a userspace mapping with correct page attributes is not an easy
task for the driver. Also the DMA-mapping framework is the only place
where the complete information about the allocated pages is available,
especially if the implementation uses IOMMU controller to provide a
contiguous buffer in DMA address space which is scattered in physical
memory space.

Surely we only need a helper which drivrs can call from their mmap routine to solve this?

Usually these drivers don't touch the buffer data at all, so the mapping
in kernel virtual address space is not needed. We can introduce
DMA_ATTRIB_NO_KERNEL_MAPPING attribute which lets kernel to skip/ignore
creation of kernel virtual mapping. This way we can save previous
vmalloc area and simply some mapping operation on a few architectures.

I really think this wants to be a separate function.  dma_alloc_coherent
is for allocating memory to be shared between the kernel and a driver;
we already have dma_map_sg for mapping userspace I/O as an alternative
interface.  This feels like it's something different again rather than
an option to dma_alloc_coherent.

-- 
Matthew Wilcox				Intel Open Source Technology Centre
"Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this
operating system, but compare it to ours.  We can't possibly take such
a retrograde step."