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. Upon registration of memory, the DPDK layers will DMA map it
to all needed devices. After registration, allocation of this memory
will be done with rte_*malloc APIs.
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 (e.g. avoid the rte_malloc header).
The user should create a memory, register it through rte_extmem_register
API, and call DMA map function in order to register such memory to
the different devices.
The scope of the patch focus on #3 above.
Currently the only way to map external memory is through VFIO
(rte_vfio_dma_map). While VFIO is common, there are other vendors
which use different ways to map memory (e.g. Mellanox and NXP).
The work in this patch moves the DMA mapping to vendor agnostic APIs.
Device level DMA map and unmap APIs were added. Implementation of those
APIs was done currently only for PCI devices.
For PCI bus devices, the pci driver can expose its own map and unmap
functions to be used for the mapping. In case the driver doesn't provide
any, the memory will be mapped, if possible, to IOMMU through VFIO APIs.
Application usage with those APIs is quite simple:
* allocate memory
* call rte_extmem_register on the memory chunk.
* take a device, and query its rte_device.
* call the device specific mapping function for this device.
Future work will deprecate the rte_vfio_dma_map and rte_vfio_dma_unmap
APIs, leaving the rte device APIs as the preferred option for the user.
Signed-off-by: Shahaf Shuler <shahafs@mellanox.com>
Acked-by: Anatoly Burakov <anatoly.burakov@intel.com>
Acked-by: Gaetan Rivet <gaetan.rivet@6wind.com>
c33a675b62