On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 10:00:29PM +0300, Oded Gabbay wrote:

On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 9:50 PM Jason Gunthorpe [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 09:43:04PM +0300, Oded Gabbay wrote:

quoted

Can you please explain why it is so important to (allow) access them
through the CPU ?

It is not so much important, as it reflects significant design choices
that are already tightly baked into alot of our stacks.

A SGL is CPU accessible by design - that is baked into this thing and
places all over the place assume it. Even in RDMA we have
RXE/SWI/HFI1/qib that might want to use the CPU side (grep for sg_page
to see)

So, the thing at the top of the stack - in this case the gaudi driver
- simply can't assume what the rest of the stack is going to do and
omit the CPU side. It breaks everything.

Logan's patch series is the most fully developed way out of this
predicament so far.

I understand the argument and I agree that for the generic case, the
top of the stack can't assume anything.
Having said that, in this case the SGL is encapsulated inside a dma-buf object.

Maybe its a stupid/over-simplified suggestion, but can't we add a
property to the dma-buf object,
that will be set by the exporter, which will "tell" the importer it
can't use any CPU fallback ? Only "real" p2p ?

The block stack has been trying to do something like this.

The flag doesn't solve the DMA API/IOMMU problems though.

Jason