[PATCH v7 16/16] ARM: LPAE: Add the Kconfig entries

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 04:03:39PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:

I think this should be selected only when we have a DMA engine supporting
64-bit addresses.  Technically LPAE itself doesn't give us that assurance.

If you have this kind of a setup:

CPU <==++==> RAM
       ||
     IOMMU
       |
   DMA device

where == and || means >32-bit addressing, and | means 32-bit addressing.

In such a setup, having dma_addr_t be 64-bit is pointless because it
should never see 64-bit addresses (the DMA API should deal with the
IOMMU and provide a list of DMA addresses to be placed into RAM for
the DMA device which takes account of the mappings setup in the IOMMU.)

So, I think 64-bit dma_addr_t should be a property of the DMA devices
present in the system rather than whether the CPUs MMU can deal with

32-bit addresses or not.