Re: [PATCH net-next 3/3] net: stmmac: Introducing support for Page Pool

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Thu, Jul 4, 2019 at 12:31 PM Ilias Apalodimas
<ilias.apalodimas@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Wed,  3 Jul 2019 12:37:50 +0200
> > Jose Abreu <Jose.Abreu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 1. page pool allocs packet. The API doesn't sync but i *think* you don't have to
> explicitly since the CPU won't touch that buffer until the NAPI handler kicks
> in. On the napi handler you need to dma_sync_single_for_cpu() and process the
> packet.

> So bvottom line i *think* we can skip the dma_sync_single_for_device() on the
> initial allocation *only*. If am terribly wrong please let me know :)

I think you have to do a sync_single_for_device /somewhere/ before the
buffer is given to the device. On a non-cache-coherent machine with
a write-back cache, there may be dirty cache lines that get written back
after the device DMA's data into it (e.g. from a previous memset
from before the buffer got freed), so you absolutely need to flush any
dirty cache lines on it first.
You may also need to invalidate the cache lines in the following
sync_single_for_cpu() to eliminate clean cache lines with stale data
that got there when speculatively reading between the cache-invalidate
and the DMA.

       Arnd