Re: [PATCH] drm/xen-front: Make shmem backed display buffer coherent

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi,

> > > +    mapping = xen_obj->base.filp->f_mapping;
> > > +    mapping_set_gfp_mask(mapping, GFP_USER | __GFP_DMA32);

> > Let's see if I understand what you're doing:
> > 
> > Here you say that the pages should be DMA accessible for devices that can
> > only see 4GB.
> 
> Yes, your understanding is correct. As we are a para-virtualized device we
> do not have strict requirements for 32-bit DMA. But, via dma-buf export,
> the buffer we create can be used by real HW, e.g. one can pass-through
> real HW devices into a guest domain and they can import our buffer (yes,
> they can be IOMMU backed and other conditions may apply).
> So, this is why we are limiting to DMA32 here, just to allow more possible
> use-cases

Sure this actually helps?  It's below 4G in guest physical address
space, so it can be backed by pages which are actually above 4G in host
physical address space ...

> > > +    if (!dma_map_sg(dev->dev, xen_obj->sgt->sgl, xen_obj->sgt->nents,
> > > +            DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL)) {
> > 
> > 
> > Are you using the DMA streaming API as a way to flush the caches?
> Yes
> > Does this mean that GFP_USER isn't making the buffer coherent?
> 
> No, it didn't help. I had a question [1] if there are any other better way
> to achieve the same, but didn't have any response yet. So, I implemented
> it via DMA API which helped.

set_pages_array_*() ?

See arch/x86/include/asm/set_memory.h

HTH,
  Gerd