Re: [RFC PATCH V2 0/7] Do not read from descripto ring

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Thu, May 06, 2021 at 01:38:29PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, May 06, 2021 at 04:12:17AM -0400, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > Let's try for just a bit, won't make this window anyway:
> > 
> > I have an old idea. Add a way to find out that unmap is a nop
> > (or more exactly does not use the address/length).
> > Then in that case even with DMA API we do not need
> > the extra data. Hmm?
> 
> So we actually do have a check for that from the early days of the DMA
> API, but it only works at compile time: CONFIG_NEED_DMA_MAP_STATE.
> 
> But given how rare configs without an iommu or swiotlb are these days
> it has stopped to be very useful.  Unfortunately a runtime-version is
> not entirely trivial, but maybe if we allow for false positives we
> could do something like this
> 
> bool dma_direct_need_state(struct device *dev)
> {
> 	/* some areas could not be covered by any map at all */
> 	if (dev->dma_range_map)
> 		return false;
> 	if (force_dma_unencrypted(dev))
> 		return false;
> 	if (dma_direct_need_sync(dev))
> 		return false;
> 	return *dev->dma_mask == DMA_BIT_MASK(64);
> }
> 
> bool dma_need_state(struct device *dev)
> {
> 	const struct dma_map_ops *ops = get_dma_ops(dev);
> 
> 	if (dma_map_direct(dev, ops))
> 		return dma_direct_need_state(dev);
> 	return ops->unmap_page ||
> 		ops->sync_single_for_cpu || ops->sync_single_for_device;
> }

Yea that sounds like a good idea. We will need to document that.


Something like:

/*
 * dma_need_state - report whether unmap calls use the address and length
 * @dev: device to guery
 *
 * This is a runtime version of CONFIG_NEED_DMA_MAP_STATE.
 *
 * Return the value indicating whether dma_unmap_* and dma_sync_* calls for the device
 * use the DMA state parameters passed to them.
 * The DMA state parameters are: scatter/gather list/table, address and
 * length.
 *
 * If dma_need_state returns false then DMA state parameters are
 * ignored by all dma_unmap_* and dma_sync_* calls, so it is safe to pass 0 for
 * address and length, and DMA_UNMAP_SG_TABLE_INVALID and
 * DMA_UNMAP_SG_LIST_INVALID for s/g table and length respectively.
 * If dma_need_state returns true then DMA state might
 * be used and so the actual values are required.
 */

And we will need DMA_UNMAP_SG_TABLE_INVALID and
DMA_UNMAP_SG_LIST_INVALID as pointers to an empty global table and list
for calls such as dma_unmap_sgtable that dereference pointers before checking
they are used.


Does this look good?

The table/length variants are for consistency, virtio specifically does
not use s/g at the moment, but it seems nicer than leaving
users wonder what to do about these.

Thoughts? Jason want to try implementing?

-- 
MST