Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] iommu: Add range flush operation

[Joerg Roedel]

Hi Tomasz,

On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 02:25:23PM +0900, Tomasz Figa wrote:
> This series tries to mitigate the two issues above, while acknowledging
> the fact that the .map_sg() callback might be still necessary for some
> specific platforms, which could have the need to iterate over SG elements
> inside driver code. Proposed solution introduces a new .flush() callback,
> which expects IOVA range as its argument and is expected to flush all
> respective caches (be it CPU, IOMMU TLB or whatever) to make the given
> IOVA area mapping change visible to IOMMU clients. Then all the 3 basic
> map/unmap operations are modified to call the .flush() callback at the end
> of the operation. 
> 
> Advantages of proposed approach include:
>  1) ability to use default_iommu_map_sg() helper if all the driver needs
>     for performance optimization is batching the flush,
>  2) completely no effect on existing code - the .flush() callback is made
>     optional and if it isn't implemented drivers are expected to do
>     necessary flushes on a page by page basis in respective (un)mapping
>     callbakcs,
>  3) possibility of exporting the iommu_flush() operation and providing
>     unsynchronized map/unmap operations for subsystems with even higher
>     requirements for performance (e.g. drivers/gpu/drm).

Thanks for the patches, I really like the idea. The VT-d driver probably
also benefits a lot from this.

In the past I also proposed something like this, it was called a new
iommu_commit() API function for making changes from map/unmap visible to
the hardware. But this requires updating all callers first, so your
approach of doing an implicit flush at the end of map/unmap is better.



	Joerg

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