CONFIG_DMA_ENGINE helptext
From: Christian Kujau
Date: Mon Oct 02 2006 - 14:17:09 EST
Hello,
I was wondering what CONFIG_DMA_ENGINE is about and the only hint I
found was this: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/25/285
That's why I was about to send the attached patch. However, from looking
at the comments in drivers/dma/dmaengine.c, it seems to be about
non-HW-specific DMA support:
"This code implements the DMA subsystem. It provides a HW-neutral
interface for other kernel code to use asynchronous memory copy
capabilities"
Because I don't know anything about the innards of DMA, can someone
please enlighten me what this knob is for and why one should enable it?
Thanks,
Christian.
--
BOFH excuse #94:
Internet outage--- linux-2.6/drivers/dma/Kconfig 2006-09-22 06:20:16.000000000 +0100
+++ linux-2.6/drivers/dma/Kconfig.edited 2006-10-02 19:04:25.000000000 +0100
@@ -8,7 +8,11 @@ config DMA_ENGINE
bool "Support for DMA engines"
---help---
DMA engines offload copy operations from the CPU to dedicated
- hardware, allowing the copies to happen asynchronously.
+ hardware, allowing the copies to happen asynchronously. Special
+ hardware is required for this, currently only the Intel E5000
+ chipset is supported, certain RAID controllers might support
+ this too. Note that this has nothing to do with PCI-DMA in
+ the first place.
comment "DMA Clients"