Re: [RFC] generic device DMA implementation

[James Bottomley]

[e-mail] said:
> actually, the device model defines a bus "type" structure rather than a
> "bus instance" structure (well, at least it did last I looked a couple
> of weeks ago). That's a problem I beleive here, as those functions are
> really a property of a given bus instance. One solution would
> eventually be to have the set of functions pointers in the generic
> struct device and by default be copied from parent to child. 

Well, the bus in the generic device model is just a struct device as well.

The parisc implementation I'm working on stores this type of conversion 
information in the platform_data field of the generic device (although the 
function pointers that make use of it are global).

I did do an implementation which added a dma_accessors set of functions to the 
struct device (and also struct bus_type), but I eventually concluded they had 
to be so platform specific that there was no utility to exposing them.

> Consistency of memory (or simply, in some cases, accessibility of
> system memory by a given device) is really a property of the bus.
> Tweaking magic bits in dma_addr_t and testing them later is a hack.
> The proper implementation is to have the consistent_{alloc,free,map,unm
> ap,sync,...) functions be function pointers in the generic bus
> structure. 

actually, in parisc, the implementation is simple.  The type of memory is 
determined globally per architecture (so it's not encoded in the dma_addr_t).  
As Adam said.  The preferred platform implementation for a machine that did 
both (I believe this is the fabled parisc V class, which I've never seen) 
would be to implement a consistent region so you could tell if dma_addr_t fell 
in that region for whether it was consistent or not.

I fully recognise that dma_addr_t actually has to be freely convertable to the 
physical address by simple casting, because that's the way the pci_ functions 
use it.

James