Re: NVMe vs DMA addressing limitations

[Sagi Grimberg]

> > Another workaround me might need is to limit amount of concurrent DMA
> > in the NVMe driver based on some platform quirk. The way that NVMe works,
> > it can have very large amounts of data that is concurrently mapped into
> > the device.
>
> That's not really just NVMe - other storage and network controllers also
> can DMA map giant amounts of memory.  There are a couple aspects to it:
>
>  - dma coherent memoery - right now NVMe doesn't use too much of it,
>    but upcoming low-end NVMe controllers will soon start to require
>    fairl large amounts of it for the host memory buffer feature that
>    allows for DRAM-less controller designs.  As an interesting quirk
>    that is memory only used by the PCIe devices, and never accessed
>    by the Linux host at all.

Would it make sense to convert the nvme driver to use normal allocations
and use the DMA streaming APIs (dma_sync_single_for_[cpu|device]) for
both queues and future HMB?

>  - size vs number of the dynamic mapping.  We probably want the dma_ops
>    specify a maximum mapping size for a given device.  As long as we
>    can make progress with a few mappings swiotlb / the iommu can just
>    fail mapping and the driver will propagate that to the block layer
>    that throttles I/O.

Isn't max mapping size per device too restrictive? it is possible that
not all devices posses active mappings concurrently.