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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/usb/dma.txt')
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/usb/dma.txt | 133 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 133 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/usb/dma.txt b/Documentation/usb/dma.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 444651e70d95..000000000000 --- a/Documentation/usb/dma.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,133 +0,0 @@ -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. - -- 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 - 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. |