On 05/18/2018 10:50 AM, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 10:20:02AM -0700, Vineet Gupta wrote:
I never understood the need for this direction. And if memory serves me
right, at that time I was seeing twice the amount of cache flushing !
It's necessary.  Take a moment to think carefully about this:

        dma_map_single(, dir)

        dma_sync_single_for_cpu(, dir)

        dma_sync_single_for_device(, dir)

        dma_unmap_single(, dir)

As an aside, do these imply a state machine of sorts - does a driver needs to always call map_single first ?

My original point of contention/confusion is the specific combinations of API and direction, specifically for_cpu(TO_DEV) and for_device(TO_CPU)

Semantically what does dma_sync_single_for_cpu(TO_DEV) even imply for a non dma coherent arch. Your tables below have "none" for both, implying it is unlikely to be a real combination (for ARM and ARC atleast).

The other case, actually @dir TO_CPU, independent of for_{cpu, device}  implies driver intends to touch it after the call, so it would invalidate any stray lines, unconditionally (and not just for speculative prefetch case).


In the case of a DMA-incoherent architecture, the operations done at each
stage depend on the direction argument:

        map             for_cpu         for_device      unmap
TO_DEV  writeback       none            writeback       none
TO_CPU  invalidate      invalidate*     invalidate      invalidate*
BIDIR   writeback       invalidate      writeback       invalidate

* - only necessary if the CPU speculatively prefetches.

The multiple invalidations for the TO_CPU case handles different
conditions that can result in data corruption, and for some CPUs, all
four are necessary.

Can you please explain in some more detail, TO_CPU row, why invalidate is conditional sometimes.

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