Re: [PATCH v6 2/5] dma-buf: heaps: Add heap helpers

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 11:20:31AM -0400, Andrew F. Davis wrote:
> Well then lets think on this. A given buffer can have 3 owners states
> (CPU-owned, Device-owned, and Un-owned). These are based on the caching
> state from the CPU perspective.
> 
> If a buffer is CPU-owned then we (Linux) can write to the buffer safely
> without worry that the data is stale or that it will be accessed by the
> device without having been flushed. Device-owned buffers should not be
> accessed by the CPU, and inter-device synchronization should be handled
> by fencing as Rob points out. Un-owned is how a buffer starts for
> consistency and to prevent unneeded cache operations on unwritten buffers.

CPU owned also needs to be split into which mapping owns it - in the
normal DMA this is the kernel direct mapping, but in dma-buf it seems
the primary way of using it in kernel space is the vmap, in addition
to that the mappings can also be exported to userspace, which is another
mapping that is possibly not cache coherent with the kernel one.