From: Paul Cercueil <[email protected]>
To: Christoph Hellwig <[email protected]>
Cc: "Jonathan Cameron" <[email protected]>,
"Sumit Semwal" <[email protected]>,
"Christian König" <[email protected]>,
[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected],
"Michael Hennerich" <[email protected]>,
"Alexandru Ardelean" <[email protected]>,
[email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: IIO, dmabuf, io_uring
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2021 11:27:40 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
Hi Christoph,
Le sam., août 14 2021 at 09:30:19 +0200, Christoph Hellwig
<[email protected]> a écrit :
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 01:41:26PM +0200, Paul Cercueil wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> A few months ago we (ADI) tried to upstream the interface we use
>> with our
>> high-speed ADCs and DACs. It is a system with custom ioctls on the
>> iio
>> device node to dequeue and enqueue buffers (allocated with
>> dma_alloc_coherent), that can then be mmap'd by userspace
>> applications.
>> Anyway, it was ultimately denied entry [1]; this API was okay in
>> ~2014 when
>> it was designed but it feels like re-inventing the wheel in 2021.
>>
>> Back to the drawing table, and we'd like to design something that
>> we can
>> actually upstream. This high-speed interface looks awfully similar
>> to
>> DMABUF, so we may try to implement a DMABUF interface for IIO,
>> unless
>> someone has a better idea.
>
> To me this does sound a lot like a dma buf use case. The interesting
> question to me is how to signal arrival of new data, or readyness to
> consume more data. I suspect that people that are actually using
> dmabuf heavily at the moment (dri/media folks) might be able to chime
> in a little more on that.
Thanks for the feedback.
I haven't looked too much into how dmabuf works; but IIO device nodes
right now have a regular stdio interface, so I believe poll() flags can
be used to signal arrival of new data.
>> Our first usecase is, we want userspace applications to be able to
>> dequeue
>> buffers of samples (from ADCs), and/or enqueue buffers of samples
>> (for
>> DACs), and to be able to manipulate them (mmapped buffers). With a
>> DMABUF
>> interface, I guess the userspace application would dequeue a dma
>> buffer
>> from the driver, mmap it, read/write the data, unmap it, then
>> enqueue it to
>> the IIO driver again so that it can be disposed of. Does that sound
>> sane?
>>
>> Our second usecase is - and that's where things get tricky - to be
>> able to
>> stream the samples to another computer for processing, over
>> Ethernet or
>> USB. Our typical setup is a high-speed ADC/DAC on a dev board with
>> a FPGA
>> and a weak soft-core or low-power CPU; processing the data in-situ
>> is not
>> an option. Copying the data from one buffer to another is not an
>> option
>> either (way too slow), so we absolutely want zero-copy.
>>
>> Usual userspace zero-copy techniques (vmsplice+splice, MSG_ZEROCOPY
>> etc)
>> don't really work with mmapped kernel buffers allocated for DMA [2]
>> and/or
>> have a huge overhead, so the way I see it, we would also need DMABUF
>> support in both the Ethernet stack and USB (functionfs) stack.
>> However, as
>> far as I understood, DMABUF is mostly a DRM/V4L2 thing, so I am
>> really not
>> sure we have the right idea here.
>>
>> And finally, there is the new kid in town, io_uring. I am not very
>> literate
>> about the topic, but it does not seem to be able to handle DMA
>> buffers
>> (yet?). The idea that we could dequeue a buffer of samples from the
>> IIO
>> device and send it over the network in one single syscall is
>> appealing,
>> though.
>
> Think of io_uring really just as an async syscall layer. It doesn't
> replace DMA buffers, but can be used as a different and for some
> workloads more efficient way to dispatch syscalls.
That was my thought, yes. Thanks.
Cheers,
-Paul
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-08-16 9:27 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-08-13 11:41 IIO, dmabuf, io_uring Paul Cercueil
2021-08-13 17:20 ` Pavel Begunkov
2021-08-16 9:20 ` Paul Cercueil
2021-08-14 7:30 ` Christoph Hellwig
2021-08-16 9:27 ` Paul Cercueil [this message]
2021-08-16 15:01 ` [Linaro-mm-sig] " Daniel Vetter
2021-08-15 18:02 ` Christian König
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