Re: [RFC RESEND 00/16] Split IOMMU DMA mapping operation to two steps

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Tue Mar 05 2024 - 07:05:48 EST


On 2024-03-05 11:18 am, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
This is complimentary part to the proposed LSF/MM topic.
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rdma/22df55f8-cf64-4aa8-8c0b-b556c867b926@xxxxxxxxx/T/#m85672c860539fdbbc8fe0f5ccabdc05b40269057

This is posted as RFC to get a feedback on proposed split, but RDMA, VFIO and
DMA patches are ready for review and inclusion, the NVMe patches are still in
progress as they require agreement on API first.

Thanks

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The DMA mapping operation performs two steps at one same time: allocates
IOVA space and actually maps DMA pages to that space. This one shot
operation works perfectly for non-complex scenarios, where callers use
that DMA API in control path when they setup hardware.

However in more complex scenarios, when DMA mapping is needed in data
path and especially when some sort of specific datatype is involved,
such one shot approach has its drawbacks.

That approach pushes developers to introduce new DMA APIs for specific
datatype. For example existing scatter-gather mapping functions, or
latest Chuck's RFC series to add biovec related DMA mapping [1] and
probably struct folio will need it too.

These advanced DMA mapping APIs are needed to calculate IOVA size to
allocate it as one chunk and some sort of offset calculations to know
which part of IOVA to map.

I don't follow this part at all - at *some* point, something must know a range of memory addresses involved in a DMA transfer, so that's where it should map that range for DMA. Even in a badly-designed system where the point it's most practical to make the mapping is further out and only knows that DMA will touch some subset of a buffer, but doesn't know exactly what subset yet, you'd usually just map the whole buffer. I don't see why the DMA API would ever need to know about anything other than pages/PFNs and dma_addr_ts (yes, it does also accept them being wrapped together in scatterlists; yes, scatterlists are awful and it would be nice to replace them with a better general DMA descriptor; that is a whole other subject of its own).

Instead of teaching DMA to know these specific datatypes, let's separate
existing DMA mapping routine to two steps and give an option to advanced
callers (subsystems) perform all calculations internally in advance and
map pages later when it is needed.

From a brief look, this is clearly an awkward reinvention of the IOMMU API. If IOMMU-aware drivers/subsystems want to explicitly manage IOMMU address spaces then they can and should use the IOMMU API. Perhaps there's room for some quality-of-life additions to the IOMMU API to help with common usage patterns, but the generic DMA mapping API is absolutely not the place for it.

Thanks,
Robin.

In this series, three users are converted and each of such conversion
presents different positive gain:
1. RDMA simplifies and speeds up its pagefault handling for
on-demand-paging (ODP) mode.
2. VFIO PCI live migration code saves huge chunk of memory.
3. NVMe PCI avoids intermediate SG table manipulation and operates
directly on BIOs.

Thanks

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/169772852492.5232.17148564580779995849.stgit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Chaitanya Kulkarni (2):
block: add dma_link_range() based API
nvme-pci: use blk_rq_dma_map() for NVMe SGL

Leon Romanovsky (14):
mm/hmm: let users to tag specific PFNs
dma-mapping: provide an interface to allocate IOVA
dma-mapping: provide callbacks to link/unlink pages to specific IOVA
iommu/dma: Provide an interface to allow preallocate IOVA
iommu/dma: Prepare map/unmap page functions to receive IOVA
iommu/dma: Implement link/unlink page callbacks
RDMA/umem: Preallocate and cache IOVA for UMEM ODP
RDMA/umem: Store ODP access mask information in PFN
RDMA/core: Separate DMA mapping to caching IOVA and page linkage
RDMA/umem: Prevent UMEM ODP creation with SWIOTLB
vfio/mlx5: Explicitly use number of pages instead of allocated length
vfio/mlx5: Rewrite create mkey flow to allow better code reuse
vfio/mlx5: Explicitly store page list
vfio/mlx5: Convert vfio to use DMA link API

Documentation/core-api/dma-attributes.rst | 7 +
block/blk-merge.c | 156 ++++++++++++++
drivers/infiniband/core/umem_odp.c | 219 +++++++------------
drivers/infiniband/hw/mlx5/mlx5_ib.h | 1 +
drivers/infiniband/hw/mlx5/odp.c | 59 +++--
drivers/iommu/dma-iommu.c | 129 ++++++++---
drivers/nvme/host/pci.c | 220 +++++--------------
drivers/vfio/pci/mlx5/cmd.c | 252 ++++++++++++----------
drivers/vfio/pci/mlx5/cmd.h | 22 +-
drivers/vfio/pci/mlx5/main.c | 136 +++++-------
include/linux/blk-mq.h | 9 +
include/linux/dma-map-ops.h | 13 ++
include/linux/dma-mapping.h | 39 ++++
include/linux/hmm.h | 3 +
include/rdma/ib_umem_odp.h | 22 +-
include/rdma/ib_verbs.h | 54 +++++
kernel/dma/debug.h | 2 +
kernel/dma/direct.h | 7 +-
kernel/dma/mapping.c | 91 ++++++++
mm/hmm.c | 34 +--
20 files changed, 870 insertions(+), 605 deletions(-)