On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 12:01:05PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

Another workaround me might need is to limit amount of concurrent DMA
in the NVMe driver based on some platform quirk. The way that NVMe works,
it can have very large amounts of data that is concurrently mapped into
the device.

That's not really just NVMe - other storage and network controllers also
can DMA map giant amounts of memory.  There are a couple aspects to it:

 - dma coherent memoery - right now NVMe doesn't use too much of it,
   but upcoming low-end NVMe controllers will soon start to require
   fairl large amounts of it for the host memory buffer feature that
   allows for DRAM-less controller designs.  As an interesting quirk
   that is memory only used by the PCIe devices, and never accessed
   by the Linux host at all.

 - size vs number of the dynamic mapping.  We probably want the dma_ops
   specify a maximum mapping size for a given device.  As long as we
   can make progress with a few mappings swiotlb / the iommu can just
   fail mapping and the driver will propagate that to the block layer
   that throttles I/O.