Re: [PATCH 3/4] dma-mapping: add a dma_ops_bypass flag to struct device

[Alexey Kardashevskiy]

On 19/04/2020 22:25, Joerg Roedel wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 10:00:58AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> The difference is that NULL ops mean imply the direct mapping is always
>> used, dma_ops_bypass means a direct mapping is used if no bounce buffering
>> using swiotlb is needed, which should also answer your first question.
>> The idea is to consolidate code in the core to use an opportunistic
>> direct mapping instead of the dynamic iommu mapping.  I though the cover
>> letter and commit log explained this well enough, but maybe I need to
>> do a better job.
> 
> Ah right, now I see it, when dma_ops_bypass is set it will only use
> direct mapping when the available memory fits into the device's
> dma_masks, and calls into dma_ops otherwise.
> 
> I wonder how that will interact with an IOMMU driver, which has to make
> sure that the direct mapping is accessible for the device at all.  It
> can either put the device into a passthrough domain for direct mapping
> or into a re-mapped domain, but then all DMA-API calls need to use dma-ops.
> When the dma_mask covers available memory but coherent_mask doesn't,
> the streaming calls will use dma-direct and alloc_coherent() calls into
> dma-ops. There is no way for the IOMMU driver to ensure both works.
> 
> So what are the conditions under which an IOMMU driver would set
> dma_ops_bypass to 1 and get a different result as to when setting
> dev->dma_ops to NULL?


One example is powerpc64/pseries (arch/powerpc/kernel/dma-iommu.c) where
dma_iommu_ops::dma_iommu_dma_supported() (i.e. need ops) decides whether
to set dma_ops_bypass to 1. It tries creating a DMA window with 1:1
mapping to fit maximum possible RAM address, if that works, then ops is
not needed.


-- 
Alexey