Hi,
On our board we've got an MV78200 and a network device between which we xfer memory chunks via the ddram with an external dma controller. To handle these xfers we're using the dma API. To tx a chunk of data from the SoC => network device, we : - prepare a buffer with a leading header embedding a pattern, - trigger the xfer and wait for an irq // The device updates the pattern and then triggers an irq - upon irq we check the pattern for the xfer completion I was expecting the following to work: addr = dma_map_single(dev, buffer, size, DMA_TO_DEVICE); dev_send(buffer); // wait for irq (don't peek in the buffer) ... got irq dma_sync_single_single_for_cpu(dev, buffer, pattern_size, DMA_FROM_DEVICE); if (!xfer_done(buffer)) // not RAM value dma_sync_single_for_device(dev, buffer, pattern_size, DMA_FROM_DEVICE); [...] But this does not work (the buffer pattern does not reflect the ddram value). On the other hand, the following works: [...] // wait for irq (don't peek in the buffer) ... got irq dma_sync_single_for_device(dev, buffer, pattern_size, DMA_FROM_DEVICE); if (!xfer_done(buffer)) // RAM value [...] Looking at dma-mapping.c:__dma_page_cpu_to_{dev,cpu}() and proc-feroceon.S: feroceon_dma_{,un}map_area this behavior is not surprising. The sync_for_cpu calls the unmap which just invalidates the outer cache while the sync_for_device invalidates both inner and outer. It seems that: - we need to invalidate after the RAM has been updated - we need to invalidate with sync_single_for_device rather than sync_single_for_cpu to check the value Is it correct ? Maybe the following comment in dma-mapping.c explains the situation : /* * The DMA API is built upon the notion of "buffer ownership". A buffer * is either exclusively owned by the CPU (and therefore may be accessed * by it) or exclusively owned by the DMA device. These helper functions * represent the transitions between these two ownership states. * * Note, however, that on later ARMs, this notion does not work due to * speculative prefetches. We model our approach on the assumption that * the CPU does do speculative prefetches, which means we clean caches * before transfers and delay cache invalidation until transfer completion. * */ Thanks for your input, Regards, Karl -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/