On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:58:08PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 18:53 +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > > I'm afraid there are several problems. The first is that it doesn't do
> > > what you want. You can't map a coherent page to userspace (which is at
> > > a non congruent address on parisc) and still expect it to be
> > > coherent ... there's going to have to be fiddling with the page table
> > > caches to make sure coherency isn't destroyed by aliasing effects
> >
> > Hmm... how bad would be the coherency with such a simple mmap method?
> > In most cases, we don't need the "perfect" coherency. Usually one
> > process mmaps the whole buffer and keep reading/writing. There is
> > another use case (sharing the mmapped buffer by multiple processes),
> > but this can be disabled if we know it's not feasible beforehand.
>
> Unfortunately, the incoherency is between the user and the kernel.
> That's where the aliasing effects occur, so realistically, even though
> you've mapped coherent memory to the user, the coherency of that memory
> is only device <-> kernel. When the any single user space process
> writes to it, the device won't see the write unless the user issues a
> flush.
Same applied on MIPS. Some platforms have the additional requirement that
the buffer must not be mapped by the TLB during the DMA operation or bad
things could happen.
Ralf
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