Re: [RFC PATCH 00/28] Removing struct page from P2PDMA

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 10:09:41AM -0600, Logan Gunthorpe wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2019-06-27 12:32 a.m., Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 03:18:07PM -0600, Logan Gunthorpe wrote:
> >>> I don't think we should make drives do that. What if it got CMB memory
> >>> on some other device?
> >>
> >> Huh? A driver submitting P2P requests finds appropriate memory to use
> >> based on the DMA device that will be doing the mapping. It *has* to. It
> >> doesn't necessarily have control over which P2P provider it might find
> >> (ie. it may get CMB memory from a random NVMe device), but it easily
> >> knows the NVMe device it got the CMB memory for. Look at the existing
> >> code in the nvme target.
> > 
> > No, this all thinking about things from the CMB perspective. With CMB
> > you don't care about the BAR location because it is just a temporary
> > buffer. That is a unique use model.
> > 
> > Every other case has data residing in BAR memory that can really only
> > reside in that one place (ie on a GPU/FPGA DRAM or something). When an IO
> > against that is run it should succeed, even if that means bounce
> > buffering the IO - as the user has really asked for this transfer to
> > happen.
> > 
> > We certainly don't get to generally pick where the data resides before
> > starting the IO, that luxury is only for CMB.
> 
> I disagree. If we we're going to implement a "bounce" we'd probably want
> to do it in two DMA requests.

How do you mean?

> So the GPU/FPGA driver would first decide whether it can do it P2P
> directly and, if it can't, would want to submit a DMA request copy
> the data to host memory and then submit an IO normally to the data's
> final destination.

I don't think a GPU/FPGA driver will be involved, this would enter the
block layer through the O_DIRECT path or something generic.. This the
general flow I was suggesting to Dan earlier

> I think it would be a larger layering violation to have the NVMe driver
> (for example) memcpy data off a GPU's bar during a dma_map step to
> support this bouncing. And it's even crazier to expect a DMA transfer to
> be setup in the map step.

Why? Don't we already expect the DMA mapper to handle bouncing for
lots of cases, how is this case different? This is the best place to
place it to make it shared.

Jason