RE: [RFC PATCH v2] uacce: Add uacce_ctrl misc device

["Song Bao Hua (Barry Song)" <song.bao.hua@hisilicon.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Gunthorpe [mailto:jgg@ziepe.ca]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2021 2:13 PM
> To: Song Bao Hua (Barry Song) <song.bao.hua@hisilicon.com>
> Cc: Wangzhou (B) <wangzhou1@hisilicon.com>; Greg Kroah-Hartman
> <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>; Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>; Zhangfei Gao
> <zhangfei.gao@linaro.org>; linux-accelerators@lists.ozlabs.org;
> linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; iommu@lists.linux-foundation.org;
> linux-mm@kvack.org; Liguozhu (Kenneth) <liguozhu@hisilicon.com>; chensihang
> (A) <chensihang1@hisilicon.com>
> Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v2] uacce: Add uacce_ctrl misc device
> 
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 11:35:22PM +0000, Song Bao Hua (Barry Song) wrote:
> 
> > > On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 10:21:14PM +0000, Song Bao Hua (Barry Song) wrote:
> > > > mlock, while certainly be able to prevent swapping out, it won't
> > > > be able to stop page moving due to:
> > > > * memory compaction in alloc_pages()
> > > > * making huge pages
> > > > * numa balance
> > > > * memory compaction in CMA
> > >
> > > Enabling those things is a major reason to have SVA device in the
> > > first place, providing a SW API to turn it all off seems like the
> > > wrong direction.
> >
> > I wouldn't say this is a major reason to have SVA. If we read the
> > history of SVA and papers, people would think easy programming due
> > to data struct sharing between cpu and device, and process space
> > isolation in device would be the major reasons for SVA. SVA also
> > declares it supports zero-copy while zero-copy doesn't necessarily
> > depend on SVA.
> 
> Once you have to explicitly make system calls to declare memory under
> IO, you loose all of that.
> 
> Since you've asked the app to be explicit about the DMAs it intends to
> do, there is not really much reason to use SVA for those DMAs anymore.

Let's see a non-SVA case. We are not using SVA, we can have
a memory pool by hugetlb or pin, and app can allocate memory
from this pool, and get stable I/O performance on the memory
from the pool. But device has its separate page table which
is not bound with this process, thus lacking the protection
of process space isolation. Plus, CPU and device are using
different address.

And then we move to SVA case, we can still have a memory pool
by hugetlb or pin, and app can allocate memory from this pool
since this pool is mapped to the address space of the process,
and we are able to get stable I/O performance since it is always
there. But in this case, device is using the page table of
process with the full permission control.
And they are using same address and can possibly enjoy the easy
programming if HW supports.

SVA is not doom to work with IO page fault only. If we have SVA+pin,
we would get both sharing address and stable I/O latency.

> 
> Jason

Thanks
Barry