Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:51:05 -0400
From: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
To: Thomas Hellstrom <thomas@shipmail.org>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Dave Airlie <airlied@redhat.com>,
        dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher@gmail.com>,
        Jerome Glisse <j.glisse@gmail.com>,
        Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] cleanup: Add 'struct dev' in the TTM layer to be
 passed in for DMA API calls.
Message-ID: <20110323125105.GA6599@dumpdata.com>
References: <1299598789-20402-1-git-send-email-konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
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 <20110322143137.GA25113@dumpdata.com>
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> >I was thinking about this a bit after I found that the PowerPC requires
> >the 'struct dev'. But I got a question first, what do you with pages
> >that were allocated to a device that can do 64-bit DMA and then
> >move it to a device than can 32-bit DMA? Obviously the 32-bit card would
> >set the TTM_PAGE_FLAG_DMA32 flag, but the 64-bit would not. What is the
> >process then? Allocate a new page from the 32-bit device and then copy over the
> >page from the 64-bit TTM and put the 64-bit TTM page?
> 
> Yes, in certain situations we need to copy, and if it's necessary in
> some cases to use coherent memory with a struct device assoicated
> with it, I agree it may be reasonable to do a copy in that case as
> well. I'm against, however, to make that the default case when
> running on bare metal.

This situation could occur on native/baremetal. When you say 'default
case' you mean for every type of page without consulting whether it 
had the TTM_PAGE_FLAG_DMA32?
> 
> However, I've looked a bit deeper into all this, and it looks like
> we already have other problems that need to be addressed, and that
> exists with the code already in git:
> 
> Consider a situation where you allocate a cached DMA32 page from the
> ttm page allocator. You'll end up with a coherent page. Then you
> make it uncached and finally you return it to the ttm page
> allocator. Since it's uncached, it will not be freed by the dma api,
> but kept in the uncached pool, and later the incorrect page free
> function will be called.

Let me look in details in the code, but I thought it would check the
TTM_PAGE_FLAG_DMA32 and direct the page to the correct pool?

We could piggyback on the idea of the struct I had and have these
values:

struct ttm_page {
	struct page *page;
	dma_addr_t	*bus_addr;
	struct *ttm_pool	*origin;
}

And the origin would point to the correct pool so that on de-allocate
it would divert it to the original one. Naturally there would
be some thinking to be done on the de-alloc path so that
the *origin isn't pointing to something htat has already been free-d.

> 
> I think we might need to take a few steps back and rethink this whole idea:
> 
> 1) How does this work in the AGP case? Let's say you allocate
> write-combined DMA32 pages from the ttm page pool (in this case you
> won't get coherent memory) and then use them in an AGP gart? Why is
> it that we don't need coherent pages then in the Xen case?

Hehe.. So I had posted a set of patches to carry the 'dma_addr_t' through
the AGP API and then to its backends to program that. And also the frontends
(so DRM, TTM) Here is the
patchset I posted some time ago:

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2010-12/msg02382.html
and the discussion:

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2010-12/msg02411.html

Dave recommended I skip AGP and just concentrate on PCIe since not to many
folks use AGP anymore. Thought I realized that server boards use PCI
cards (ATI ES1000), which do utilize the AGP API. So there is breakage there
and I have a set of patches for this that I was in process of rebasing
on 2.6.39-rcX.

> 
> 2) http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/DMA-API.txt, line 33
> makes me scared.
> We should identify what platforms may have problems with this.

Right.. I think nobody much thought about this in context of TTM since
that was only used on X86. I can take a look at the DMA API's of the
other two major platforms: IA64 and PPC and see what lurks there.

> 
> 3) When hacking on the unichrome DMA engine it wasn't that hard to
> use the synchronization functions of the DMA api correctly:
> 
>  When binding a TTM, the backend calls dma_map_page() on pages, When
> unbinding, the backend calls dma_unmap_page(), If we need cpu access
> when bound, we need to call dma_sync_single_for_[cpu|device]. If
> this is done, it will be harder to implement user-space
> sub-allocation, but possible. There will be a performance loss on
> some platforms, though.

Yup. That was my other suggestion about this. But I had no idea
where to sprinkle those 'dma_sync_single_[*]' calls, as they would
have been done in the drivers. Probably on its DMA paths, right before
telling the GPU to process the CP, and when receiving an interrupt
when the CP has been completed.
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