Re: [PATCH 1/4] net: thunderx: Fix IOMMU translation faults

[Sunil Kovvuri]

On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 11:26 PM, David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: sunil.kovvuri@xxxxxxxxx
> Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2017 16:17:47 +0530
>
>> @@ -1643,6 +1650,9 @@ static int nicvf_probe(struct pci_dev *pdev, const struct pci_device_id *ent)
>>       if (!pass1_silicon(nic->pdev))
>>               nic->hw_tso = true;
>>
>> +     /* Check if we are attached to IOMMU */
>> +     nic->iommu_domain = iommu_get_domain_for_dev(dev);
>
> This function is not universally available.

Even if CONFIG_IOMMU_API is not enabled, it will return NULL and will be okay.
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/include/linux/iommu.h#L400

>
> This looks very hackish to me anyways, how all of this stuff is supposed
> to work is that you simply use the DMA interfaces unconditionally and
> whatever is behind the operations takes care of everything.
>
> Doing it conditionally in the driver with all of this special IOMMU
> domain et al. knowledge makes no sense to me at all.
>
> I don't see other drivers doing stuff like this at all, so if you're
> going to handle this in a unique way like this you better write
> several paragraphs in your commit message explaining why this weird
> crap is necessary.

I already tried to explain in the commit message that HW anyway takes care
of data coherency, so calling DMA interfaces when there is no IOMMU will
only result in performance drop.

We are seeing a 0.75Mpps drop with IP forwarding rate due to that.
Hence I have restricted calling DMA interfaces to only when IOMMU is enabled.