Re: [PATCH RFC 0/2] dma-pool: allow user to disable atomic pool

[Tom Lendacky]

On 8/10/21 9:23 PM, Baoquan He wrote:
> On 08/10/21 at 03:52pm, Tom Lendacky wrote:
>> On 8/5/21 1:54 AM, Baoquan He wrote:
>>> On 06/24/21 at 11:47am, Robin Murphy wrote:
>>>> On 2021-06-24 10:29, Baoquan He wrote:
>>>>> On 06/24/21 at 08:40am, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

...

> Looking at the those related commits, the below one from David tells 
> that atomic dma pool is used when device require non-blocking and
> unencrypted buffer. When I checked the system I borrowed, it's AMD EYPC
> and SME is enabled. And it has many pci devices, as you can see, its 'ls
> pci' outputs 113 lines. But disabling the three atomic pools didn't
> trigger any error on that AMD system. Does it mean only specific devices
> need this atomic pool in SME/SEV enabling case? Should we add more
> details in document or code comment to make clear this? 

It very well could be just the devices being used. Under SME (bare metal),
if a device supports 64-bit DMA, then bounce buffers aren't used and the
DMA can be performed directly to encrypted memory, so there is no need to
issue a set_memory_decrypted() call, so I would assume it likely isn't
using the pool.

Under SEV, however, all DMA has to go through guest un-encrypted memory.
If you pass through a device that does dma_alloc_coherent() calls with
GFP_ATOMIC, then the pool will be needed.

Thanks,
Tom