Re: [PATCH 3/4] dma-buf: add support for mapping with dma mapping attributes

From: Andrew F. Davis
Date: Mon Jan 21 2019 - 14:49:59 EST


On 1/21/19 1:44 PM, Liam Mark wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jan 2019, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jan 19, 2019 at 08:50:41AM -0800, Laura Abbott wrote:
>>>> And who is going to decide which ones to pass? And who documents
>>>> which ones are safe?
>>>>
>>>> I'd much rather have explicit, well documented dma-buf flags that
>>>> might get translated to the DMA API flags, which are not error checked,
>>>> not very well documented and way to easy to get wrong.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not sure having flags in dma-buf really solves anything
>>> given drivers can use the attributes directly with dma_map
>>> anyway, which is what we're looking to do. The intention
>>> is for the driver creating the dma_buf attachment to have
>>> the knowledge of which flags to use.
>>
>> Well, there are very few flags that you can simply use for all calls of
>> dma_map*. And given how badly these flags are defined I just don't want
>> people to add more places where they indirectly use these flags, as
>> it will be more than enough work to clean up the current mess.
>>
>> What flag(s) do you want to pass this way, btw? Maybe that is where
>> the problem is.
>>
>
> The main use case is for allowing clients to pass in
> DMA_ATTR_SKIP_CPU_SYNC in order to skip the default cache maintenance
> which happens in dma_buf_map_attachment and dma_buf_unmap_attachment. In
> ION the buffers aren't usually accessed from the CPU so this allows
> clients to often avoid doing unnecessary cache maintenance.
>

How can a client know that no CPU access has occurred that needs to be
flushed out?

>
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