Re: [RFC] Make use of non-dynamic dmabuf in RDMA

[Gal Pressman <galpress@amazon.com>]

On 18/08/2021 11:00, Christian König wrote:
> Am 18.08.21 um 09:43 schrieb Gal Pressman:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> Currently, the RDMA subsystem can only work with dynamic dmabuf
>> attachments, which requires the RDMA device to support on-demand-paging
>> (ODP) which is not common on most devices (only supported by mlx5).
>>
>> While the dynamic requirement makes sense for certain GPUs, some devices
>> (such as habanalabs) have device memory that is always "pinned" and do
>> not need/use the move_notify operation.
>>
>> The motivation of this RFC is to use habanalabs as the dmabuf exporter,
>> and EFA as the importer to allow for peer2peer access through libibverbs.
>>
>> This draft patch changes the dmabuf driver to differentiate between
>> static/dynamic attachments by looking at the move_notify op instead of
>> the importer_ops struct, and allowing the peer2peer flag to be enabled
>> in case of a static exporter.
> 
> Well NAK to the general approach, this can be solved much easier.
> 
> If you can't support dynamic moves while using the buffer then just pin all
> buffers during import/export.
> 
> This avoids the move notification and the framework/exporter can still correctly
> account for pinned buffers.
> 
> But please note that at least amdgpu never uses P2P support for pinned buffers
> since we want to avoid that unmoveable buffers clutter video memory and create
> conflicts with V4L and scanout.
> 
> If you don't have such concerns in habanalabs then you can implement the pinning
> there while keeping P2P still enabled.
Thanks Christian!

Are you suggesting to pass an empty move_notify callback instead of passing NULL?
Also, doesn't the pin operation move the memory from the device to host memory?