NETIF_F_HIGHDMA misuse in networking drivers?

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Sat Feb 20 2010 - 13:29:23 EST


Was just part of a discussion in another thread talking about 64-bit DMA support issues where NETIF_F_HIGHDMA came up. I was originally under the impression that this flag indicated the device supported 64-bit DMA addressing. However, from looking at the code that checks for it (and, well, the actual comment for the flag) it really means "can access highmem" which has nothing to do with 64-bit at all. And if there's no highmem (like on x86_64) it has no effect at all.

From looking at some drivers, however, it seems a lot of others had similar confusion, as they are doing things like setting NETIF_F_HIGHDMA conditionally on whether setting 64-bit DMA mask succeeds:

drivers/net/8139cp.c:

if (pci_using_dac)
dev->features |= NETIF_F_HIGHDMA;

drivers/net/jme.c:

if (jme->dev->features & NETIF_F_HIGHDMA)
rxdesc->desc1.flags = RXFLAG_64BIT;

drivers/net/forcedeth.c:

if (dma_64bit) {
if (pci_set_dma_mask(pci_dev, DMA_BIT_MASK(39)))
dev_printk(KERN_INFO, &pci_dev->dev,
"64-bit DMA failed, using 32-bit addressing\n");
else
dev->features |= NETIF_F_HIGHDMA;

(the last one is extra funny because it keeps saying 64-bit when it's really only 39-bit..)

The net result is that a lot of drivers aren't setting the HIGHDMA flag where they should, and thus on architectures where highmem exists, resulting in a bunch of unnecessary copying.

Assuming my interpretation is correct, I could try and fix up some of this mess.. any comments?
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