diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/driver-api')
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/driver-api/usb/dma.rst | 136 | ||||
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/driver-api/usb/index.rst | 1 |
2 files changed, 137 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/driver-api/usb/dma.rst b/Documentation/driver-api/usb/dma.rst new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..59d5aee89e37 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/driver-api/usb/dma.rst @@ -0,0 +1,136 @@ +USB DMA +~~~~~~~ + +In Linux 2.5 kernels (and later), USB device drivers have additional control +over how DMA may be used to perform I/O operations. The APIs are detailed +in the kernel usb programming guide (kerneldoc, from the source code). + +API overview +============ + +The big picture is that USB drivers can continue to ignore most DMA issues, +though they still must provide DMA-ready buffers (see +``Documentation/DMA-API-HOWTO.txt``). That's how they've worked through +the 2.4 (and earlier) kernels, or they can now be DMA-aware. + +DMA-aware usb drivers: + +- New calls enable DMA-aware drivers, letting them allocate dma buffers and + manage dma mappings for existing dma-ready buffers (see below). + +- URBs have an additional "transfer_dma" field, as well as a transfer_flags + bit saying if it's valid. (Control requests also have "setup_dma", but + drivers must not use it.) + +- "usbcore" will map this DMA address, if a DMA-aware driver didn't do + it first and set ``URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP``. HCDs + don't manage dma mappings for URBs. + +- There's a new "generic DMA API", parts of which are usable by USB device + drivers. Never use dma_set_mask() on any USB interface or device; that + would potentially break all devices sharing that bus. + +Eliminating copies +================== + +It's good to avoid making CPUs copy data needlessly. The costs can add up, +and effects like cache-trashing can impose subtle penalties. + +- If you're doing lots of small data transfers from the same buffer all + the time, that can really burn up resources on systems which use an + IOMMU to manage the DMA mappings. It can cost MUCH more to set up and + tear down the IOMMU mappings with each request than perform the I/O! + + For those specific cases, USB has primitives to allocate less expensive + memory. They work like kmalloc and kfree versions that give you the right + kind of addresses to store in urb->transfer_buffer and urb->transfer_dma. + You'd also set ``URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP`` in urb->transfer_flags:: + + void *usb_alloc_coherent (struct usb_device *dev, size_t size, + int mem_flags, dma_addr_t *dma); + + void usb_free_coherent (struct usb_device *dev, size_t size, + void *addr, dma_addr_t dma); + + Most drivers should **NOT** be using these primitives; they don't need + to use this type of memory ("dma-coherent"), and memory returned from + :c:func:`kmalloc` will work just fine. + + The memory buffer returned is "dma-coherent"; sometimes you might need to + force a consistent memory access ordering by using memory barriers. It's + not using a streaming DMA mapping, so it's good for small transfers on + systems where the I/O would otherwise thrash an IOMMU mapping. (See + ``Documentation/DMA-API-HOWTO.txt`` for definitions of "coherent" and + "streaming" DMA mappings.) + + Asking for 1/Nth of a page (as well as asking for N pages) is reasonably + space-efficient. + + On most systems the memory returned will be uncached, because the + semantics of dma-coherent memory require either bypassing CPU caches + or using cache hardware with bus-snooping support. While x86 hardware + has such bus-snooping, many other systems use software to flush cache + lines to prevent DMA conflicts. + +- Devices on some EHCI controllers could handle DMA to/from high memory. + + Unfortunately, the current Linux DMA infrastructure doesn't have a sane + way to expose these capabilities ... and in any case, HIGHMEM is mostly a + design wart specific to x86_32. So your best bet is to ensure you never + pass a highmem buffer into a USB driver. That's easy; it's the default + behavior. Just don't override it; e.g. with ``NETIF_F_HIGHDMA``. + + This may force your callers to do some bounce buffering, copying from + high memory to "normal" DMA memory. If you can come up with a good way + to fix this issue (for x86_32 machines with over 1 GByte of memory), + feel free to submit patches. + +Working with existing buffers +============================= + +Existing buffers aren't usable for DMA without first being mapped into the +DMA address space of the device. However, most buffers passed to your +driver can safely be used with such DMA mapping. (See the first section +of Documentation/DMA-API-HOWTO.txt, titled "What memory is DMA-able?") + +- When you're using scatterlists, you can map everything at once. On some + systems, this kicks in an IOMMU and turns the scatterlists into single + DMA transactions:: + + int usb_buffer_map_sg (struct usb_device *dev, unsigned pipe, + struct scatterlist *sg, int nents); + + void usb_buffer_dmasync_sg (struct usb_device *dev, unsigned pipe, + struct scatterlist *sg, int n_hw_ents); + + void usb_buffer_unmap_sg (struct usb_device *dev, unsigned pipe, + struct scatterlist *sg, int n_hw_ents); + + It's probably easier to use the new ``usb_sg_*()`` calls, which do the DMA + mapping and apply other tweaks to make scatterlist i/o be fast. + +- Some drivers may prefer to work with the model that they're mapping large + buffers, synchronizing their safe re-use. (If there's no re-use, then let + usbcore do the map/unmap.) Large periodic transfers make good examples + here, since it's cheaper to just synchronize the buffer than to unmap it + each time an urb completes and then re-map it on during resubmission. + + These calls all work with initialized urbs: ``urb->dev``, ``urb->pipe``, + ``urb->transfer_buffer``, and ``urb->transfer_buffer_length`` must all be + valid when these calls are used (``urb->setup_packet`` must be valid too + if urb is a control request):: + + struct urb *usb_buffer_map (struct urb *urb); + + void usb_buffer_dmasync (struct urb *urb); + + void usb_buffer_unmap (struct urb *urb); + + The calls manage ``urb->transfer_dma`` for you, and set + ``URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP`` so that usbcore won't map or unmap the buffer. + They cannot be used for setup_packet buffers in control requests. + +Note that several of those interfaces are currently commented out, since +they don't have current users. See the source code. Other than the dmasync +calls (where the underlying DMA primitives have changed), most of them can +easily be commented back in if you want to use them. diff --git a/Documentation/driver-api/usb/index.rst b/Documentation/driver-api/usb/index.rst index 23c76c17fc19..d7610777784b 100644 --- a/Documentation/driver-api/usb/index.rst +++ b/Documentation/driver-api/usb/index.rst @@ -9,6 +9,7 @@ Linux USB API anchors bulk-streams callbacks + dma power-management writing_usb_driver writing_musb_glue_layer |