Re: [PATCH 0/3] Add API for weak DMA masks

[Michael Buesch]

On Thursday 01 May 2008 18:30:04 Jesse Barnes wrote:
> On Thursday, May 01, 2008 9:07 am Michael Buesch wrote:
> > On Thursday 01 May 2008 17:58:26 Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 05:47:26PM +0200, Michael Buesch wrote:
> > > > We've discussed that and this behaviour is not acceptable, as the
> > > > driver must know about a possible fallback in case it can do 32bit DMA
> > > > more efficiently than 64bit DMA, for example.
> > >
> > > That's what we have dma_get_required_mask() for.  See
> > > Documentation/DMA-API.txt.
> >
> > So well. I'm still unsure about the advantage of having some opencoded
> > probe loop in the driver, instead of implementing it in a common place
> > and doing all of it with a single API call.
> > We can still call dma_get_required_mask() and adjust the mask to that
> > in dma_set_mask_weak(). That can _additionally_ be done there.
> 
> So I think we're agreed that we want some core function to fall back to 
> different mask values, but yeah, making it take dma_get_required_mask into 
> account would also be good.

Ok, will redo the patches with that added and the name changed.

> Most drivers just do the fallback themselves, right?

Right.

> So it makes sense to  
> just update the current code to fallback, and update drivers wanting specific 
> mask values to check afterwards.  I hate to inflict that kind of driver wide 
> update on Michael though... :)

Well, that's a lot of work and I'm not sure it's worth it.
I could live with having dma_set_mask as an API that fails on bad masks
and dma_request_mask as an API above that which retries. I think that's
just fine. Drivers can be migrated over time to the new API (or not. That
can be the driver maintainer's choice).

-- 
Greetings Michael.
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