[ adding Ashok and David for potential iommu comments ] On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 2:42 PM, Stephen Bates <sba...@raithlin.com> wrote: > This patch follows from an RFC we did earlier this year [1]. This > patchset applies cleanly to v4.9-rc1. > > Updates since RFC > ----------------- > Rebased. > Included the iopmem driver in the submission. > > History > ------- > > There have been several attempts to upstream patchsets that enable > DMAs between PCIe peers. These include Peer-Direct [2] and DMA-Buf > style patches [3]. None have been successful to date. Haggai Eran > gives a nice overview of the prior art in this space in his cover > letter [3]. > > Motivation and Use Cases > ------------------------ > > PCIe IO devices are getting faster. It is not uncommon now to find PCIe > network and storage devices that can generate and consume several GB/s. > Almost always these devices have either a high performance DMA engine, a > number of exposed PCIe BARs or both. > > Until this patch, any high-performance transfer of information between > two PICe devices has required the use of a staging buffer in system > memory. With this patch the bandwidth to system memory is not compromised > when high-throughput transfers occurs between PCIe devices. This means > that more system memory bandwidth is available to the CPU cores for data > processing and manipulation. In addition, in systems where the two PCIe > devices reside behind a PCIe switch the datapath avoids the CPU > entirely.
I agree with the motivation and the need for a solution, but I have some questions about this implementation. > > Consumers > --------- > > We provide a PCIe device driver in an accompanying patch that can be > used to map any PCIe BAR into a DAX capable block device. For > non-persistent BARs this simply serves as an alternative to using > system memory bounce buffers. For persistent BARs this can serve as an > additional storage device in the system. Why block devices? I wonder if iopmem was initially designed back when we were considering enabling DAX for raw block devices. However, that support has since been ripped out / abandoned. You currently need a filesystem on top of a block-device to get DAX operation. Putting xfs or ext4 on top of PCI-E memory mapped range seems awkward if all you want is a way to map the bar for another PCI-E device in the topology. If you're only using the block-device as a entry-point to create dax-mappings then a device-dax (drivers/dax/) character-device might be a better fit. > > Testing and Performance > ----------------------- > > We have done a moderate about of testing of this patch on a QEMU > environment and on real hardware. On real hardware we have observed > peer-to-peer writes of up to 4GB/s and reads of up to 1.2 GB/s. In > both cases these numbers are limitations of our consumer hardware. In > addition, we have observed that the CPU DRAM bandwidth is not impacted > when using IOPMEM which is not the case when a traditional path > through system memory is taken. > > For more information on the testing and performance results see the > GitHub site [4]. > > Known Issues > ------------ > > 1. Address Translation. Suggestions have been made that in certain > architectures and topologies the dma_addr_t passed to the DMA master > in a peer-2-peer transfer will not correctly route to the IO memory > intended. However in our testing to date we have not seen this to be > an issue, even in systems with IOMMUs and PCIe switches. It is our > understanding that an IOMMU only maps system memory and would not > interfere with device memory regions. (It certainly has no opportunity > to do so if the transfer gets routed through a switch). > There may still be platforms where peer-to-peer cycles are routed up through the root bridge and then back down to target device, but we can address that when / if it happens. I wonder if we could (ab)use a software-defined 'pasid' as the requester id for a peer-to-peer mapping that needs address translation. > 2. Memory Segment Spacing. This patch has the same limitations that > ZONE_DEVICE does in that memory regions must be spaces at least > SECTION_SIZE bytes part. On x86 this is 128MB and there are cases where > BARs can be placed closer together than this. Thus ZONE_DEVICE would not > be usable on neighboring BARs. For our purposes, this is not an issue as > we'd only be looking at enabling a single BAR in a given PCIe device. > More exotic use cases may have problems with this. I'm working on patches for 4.10 to allow mixing multiple devm_memremap_pages() allocations within the same physical section. Hopefully this won't be a problem going forward. > 3. Coherency Issues. When IOMEM is written from both the CPU and a PCIe > peer there is potential for coherency issues and for writes to occur out > of order. This is something that users of this feature need to be > cognizant of. Though really, this isn't much different than the > existing situation with things like RDMA: if userspace sets up an MR > for remote use, they need to be careful about using that memory region > themselves. We might be able to mitigate this by indicating that the mapping is busy for device-to-device transfers. But you're right we could wait to see how much of a problem this is in practice. > > 4. Architecture. Currently this patch is applicable only to x86_64 > architectures. The same is true for much of the code pertaining to > PMEM and ZONE_DEVICE. It is hoped that the work will be extended to other > ARCH over time. > > References > ---------- > [1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/8583221/ > [2] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.rdma/21849 > [3] http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-rdma/msg38748.html > [4] https://github.com/sbates130272/zone-device > > Logan Gunthorpe (1): > memremap.c : Add support for ZONE_DEVICE IO memory with struct pages. I haven't yet grokked the motivation for this, but I'll go comment on that separately. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-block" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
