Re: How to efficiently handle DMA and cache on ARMv7 ? (was"Is get_user_pages() enough to prevent pages from being swapped out ?")

From: David Xiao
Date: Tue Aug 25 2009 - 18:03:07 EST


On Tue, 2009-08-25 at 05:53 -0700, Steven Walter wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Russell King - ARM
> Linux<linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [...]
> > As far as userspace DMA coherency, the only way you could do it with
> > current kernel APIs is by using get_user_pages(), creating a scatterlist
> > from those, and then passing it to dma_map_sg(). While the device has
> > ownership of the SG, userspace must _not_ touch the buffer until after
> > DMA has completed.
> [...]
>
> Would that work on a processor with VIVT caches? It seems not. In
> particular, dma_map_page uses page_address to get a virtual address to
> pass to map_single(). map_single() in turn uses this address to
> perform cache maintenance. Since page_address() returns the kernel
> virtual address, I don't see how any cache-lines for the userspace
> virtual address would get invalidated (for the DMA_FROM_DEVICE case).
>
> If that's true, then what is the correct way to allow DMA to/from a
> userspace buffer with a VIVT cache? If not true, what am I missing?

page_address() is basically returning page->virtual, which records the
virtual/physical mapping for both user/kernel space; and what only
matters there is highmem or not.

David


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