Subject: Re: [PATCH v1 00/16] dma-mapping: migrate to physical address-based API

From: Jason Gunthorpe <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2025 11:19:29 -0300

On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 03:42:34PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> Changelog:
> v1:
>  * Added new DMA_ATTR_MMIO attribute to indicate
>    PCI_P2PDMA_MAP_THRU_HOST_BRIDGE path.
>  * Rewrote dma_map_* functions to use thus new attribute
> v0: https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email-masked]/
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> This series refactors the DMA mapping to use physical addresses
> as the primary interface instead of page+offset parameters. This
> change aligns the DMA API with the underlying hardware reality where
> DMA operations work with physical addresses, not page structures.

Lets elaborate this as Robin asked:

This series refactors the DMA mapping API to provide a phys_addr_t
based, and struct-page free, external API that can handle all the
mapping cases we want in modern systems:

 - struct page based cachable DRAM
 - struct page MEMORY_DEVICE_PCI_P2PDMA PCI peer to peer non-cachable MMIO
 - struct page-less PCI peer to peer non-cachable MMIO
 - struct page-less "resource" MMIO

Overall this gets much closer to Matthew's long term wish for
struct-pageless IO to cachable DRAM. The remaining primary work would
be in the mm side to allow kmap_local_pfn()/phys_to_virt() to work on
phys_addr_t without a struct page.

The general design is to remove struct page usage entirely from the
DMA API inner layers. For flows that need to have a KVA for the
physical address they can use kmap_local_pfn() or phys_to_virt(). This
isolates the struct page requirements to MM code only. Long term all
removals of struct page usage are supporting Matthew's memdesc
project which seeks to substantially transform how struct page works.

Instead make the DMA API internals work on phys_addr_t. Internally
there are still dedicated 'page' and 'resource' flows, except they are
now distinguished by a new DMA_ATTR_MMIO instead of by callchain. Both
flows use the same phys_addr_t.

When DMA_ATTR_MMIO is specified things work similar to the existing
'resource' flow. kmap_local_pfn(), phys_to_virt(), phys_to_page(),
pfn_valid(), etc are never called on the phys_addr_t. This requires
rejecting any configuration that would need swiotlb. CPU cache
flushing is not required, and avoided, as ATTR_MMIO also indicates the
address have no cachable mappings. This effectively removes any
DMA API side requirement to have struct page when DMA_ATTR_MMIO is
used.

In the !DMA_ATTR_MMIO mode things work similarly to the 'page' flow,
except on the common path of no cache flush, no swiotlb it never
touches a struct page. When cache flushing or swiotlb copying
kmap_local_pfn()/phys_to_virt() are used to get a KVA for CPU
usage. This was already the case on the unmap side, now the map side
is symmetric.

Callers are adjusted to set DMA_ATTR_MMIO. Existing 'resource' users
must set it. The existing struct page based MEMORY_DEVICE_PCI_P2PDMA
path must also set it. This corrects some existing bugs where iommu
mappings for P2P MMIO were improperly marked IOMMU_CACHE.

Since ATTR_MMIO is made to work with all the existing DMA map entry
points, particularly dma_iova_link(), this finally allows a way to use
the new DMA API to map PCI P2P MMIO without creating struct page. The
VFIO DMABUF series demonstrates how this works. This is intended to
replace the incorrect driver use of dma_map_resource() on PCI BAR
addresses.

This series does the core code and modern flows. A followup series
will give the same treatement to the legacy dma_ops implementation.

Jason