Re: [Linaro-mm-sig] [PATCH v3 1/2] habanalabs: define uAPI to export FD for DMA-BUF

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 10:00:29PM +0300, Oded Gabbay wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 9:50 PM Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 09:43:04PM +0300, Oded Gabbay wrote:
> >
> > > Can you please explain why it is so important to (allow) access them
> > > through the CPU ?
> >
> > It is not so much important, as it reflects significant design choices
> > that are already tightly baked into alot of our stacks.
> >
> > A SGL is CPU accessible by design - that is baked into this thing and
> > places all over the place assume it. Even in RDMA we have
> > RXE/SWI/HFI1/qib that might want to use the CPU side (grep for sg_page
> > to see)
> >
> > So, the thing at the top of the stack - in this case the gaudi driver
> > - simply can't assume what the rest of the stack is going to do and
> > omit the CPU side. It breaks everything.
> >
> > Logan's patch series is the most fully developed way out of this
> > predicament so far.
> 
> I understand the argument and I agree that for the generic case, the
> top of the stack can't assume anything.
> Having said that, in this case the SGL is encapsulated inside a dma-buf object.
>
> Maybe its a stupid/over-simplified suggestion, but can't we add a
> property to the dma-buf object,
> that will be set by the exporter, which will "tell" the importer it
> can't use any CPU fallback ? Only "real" p2p ?

The block stack has been trying to do something like this.

The flag doesn't solve the DMA API/IOMMU problems though.

Jason