Re: [PATCH] swiotlb: sync buffer when mapping FROM_DEVICE

[Robin Murphy]

On 22/05/2019 14:34, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 02:25:38PM +0100, Robin Murphy wrote:
> > Sure, but that should be irrelevant since the effective problem here is in
> > the sync_*_for_cpu direction, and it's the unmap which nobbles the buffer.
> > If the driver does this:
> >
> > 	dma_map_single(whole buffer);
> > 	<device writes to part of buffer>
> > 	dma_unmap_single(whole buffer);
> > 	<contents of rest of buffer now undefined>
> >
> > then it could instead do this and be happy:
> >
> > 	dma_map_single(whole buffer, SKIP_CPU_SYNC);
> > 	<device writes to part of buffer>
> > 	dma_sync_single_for_cpu(updated part of buffer);
> > 	dma_unmap_single(whole buffer, SKIP_CPU_SYNC);
> > 	<contents of rest of buffer still valid>
>
> Assuming the driver knows how much was actually DMAed this would
> solve the issue.  Horia, does this work for you?

Ohhh, and now I've just twigged what you were suggesting - your 
DMA_ATTR_PARTIAL flag would mean "treat this as a read-modify-write of 
the buffer because we *don't* know exactly which parts the device may 
write to". So indeed if we did go down that route we wouldn't need any 
of the sync stuff I was worrying about (but I might suggest naming it 
DMA_ATTR_UPDATE instead). Apologies for being slow :)

Robin.