On 13-Feb-19 7:24 PM, Shahaf Shuler wrote:
Wednesday, February 13, 2019 1:43 PM, Alejandro Lucero:
Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 0/6] introduce DMA memory mapping for
external memory
On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 9:11 AM Shahaf Shuler <shah...@mellanox.com>
wrote:
This series is in continue to RFC[1].
The DPDK APIs expose 3 different modes to work with memory used for
DMA:
1. Use the DPDK owned memory (backed by the DPDK provided
hugepages).
This memory is allocated by the DPDK libraries, included in the DPDK
memory system (memseg lists) and automatically DMA mapped by the
DPDK
layers.
2. Use memory allocated by the user and register to the DPDK memory
systems. This is also referred as external memory. Upon registration
of the external memory, the DPDK layers will DMA map it to all needed
devices.
3. Use memory allocated by the user and not registered to the DPDK
memory system. This is for users who wants to have tight control on
this memory. The user will need to explicitly call DMA map function in
order to register such memory to the different devices.
The scope of the patch focus on #3 above.
Why can not we have case 2 covering case 3?
Because it is not our choice rather the DPDK application.
We could not allow it, and force the application to register their external
memory to the DPDK memory management system. However IMO it will be wrong.
The use case exists - some application wants to manage their memory by
themselves. w/o the extra overhead of rte_malloc, without creating a special
socket to populate the memory and without redundant API calls to rte_extmem_*.
Simply allocate chunk of memory, DMA map it to device and that’s it.
Just a small note: while this sounds good on paper, i should point out
that at least *registering* the memory with DPDK is a necessity. You may
see rte_extmem_* calls as redundant (and i agree, to an extent), but we
don't advertise our PMD's capabilities in a way that makes it easy to
determine whether a particular PMD will or will not work without
registering external memory within DPDK (i.e. does it use
rte_virt2memseg() internally, for example).
So, extmem register calls are a necessary evil in such case, and IMO
should be called out as required for such external memory usage scenario.
--
Thanks,
Anatoly
