From: David Thompson <davthomp...@nvidia.com> Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2020 18:51:39 +0000
> When I wrote the Kconfig definition I was thinking that "INET" is an > obvious functional dependency for an Ethernet driver. People can and should be able to use your driver even if ipv4/ipv6 is disabled, don't you think? > Yes, the mlxbf_gige silicon block needs to be programmed with the > buffer's physical address so that the silicon logic can DMA incoming > packet data into the buffer. The kernel API "dma_alloc_coherent()" > meets the driver's requirements in that it returns a CPU-useable address > as well as a bus/physical address (used by silicon). For descriptors and statistics blocks, coherent DMA memory makes sense. For packet data, it does not. These are streaming blocks of memory that have their cohernecy managed by appropriate map/unmap/sync calls.
