Re: [RFC 4/4] drm: Add NVIDIA Tegra support

[Daniel Vetter <daniel@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 11:18:19AM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Thursday 12 April 2012, Marek Szyprowski wrote:
> > Scatter lists were initially designed for the disk based block io operations, 
> > hence the presence of the in-page offsets and lengths for each chunk. For 
> > multimedia use cases providing an array of struct pages and asking dma-mapping 
> > to map them into contiguous memory is probably all we need. I wonder if 
> > introducing such new calls is a good idea. Anrd, what do think? It will 
> > definitely simplify the drivers and improve the code understanding. On the 
> > other hand it requires a significant amount of work in the dma-mapping 
> > framework for all architectures, but that's not a big issue for me.
> 
> My feeling is that it's too much like the existing _sg version, so I wouldn't
> add yet another variant. While having a simple page array is definitely
> simpler and potentially faster, I think the API is already too complex
> and we need to be very careful with new additions.

I concur here. For VT-d support we wrestle the pages through an sg list in
drm/i915, too. It's not beautiful, and because our gpu internal pagetables
need 2 loops to walk the sg lists, one for the sg segments, one to loop
over all pages in a segment. And additional a WARN_ON if the segment
dma address isn't page-aligned. It's ugly, but imo adding some helpers to
easier deal with this common case (like the drm_prime_pages_to_sg)
function is better than creating an entirely new interface.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Mail: daniel@xxxxxxxx
Mobile: +41 (0)79 365 57 48
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