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authorTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>2026-09-14 22:12:34 -1000
committerTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>2026-09-15 06:57:20 -1000
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tree95807ff0e511c05602ef34808cfc660303309057 /Documentation/driver-api/usb/dma.rst
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sched_ext: Maintain an online cid mask in the scheduler arenagrafted
Schedulers on the default cid mapping treat [0, nr_online_cids) as the online set and restart on hotplug. Schedulers that install their own mapping with scx_bpf_cid_override() have no way to learn which cids are online: the count no longer identifies members and the CPU-form cpumask is unusable from cid programs. This is an obvious hole in the cid API. Add scx_bpf_online_cmask(), a kernel-maintained cmask in the scheduler's arena, allocated alongside the per-CPU scratch masks and populated after the cid mapping is finalized and before ops.init(), for child schedulers too. The pointer stays valid through ops.exit() with no reference to take. It is the arena offset as a void pointer, the same form struct_ops arena arguments arrive in. The verifier types the void return as a scalar for the program's arena cast. The mask follows the SCX hotplug notifications: seeded from cpu_active_mask and updated before ops.cid_online/offline() runs, so it lags cpu_online_mask only inside a hotplug transition. Updates walk the scheduler list under the lock that also serializes unlinking. Reads are live, not atomic snapshots. Root initialization excludes hotplug. v2: Reworded the getter kerneldoc (Andrea Righi). Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Andrea Righi <arighi@nvidia.com>
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+USB DMA
+~~~~~~~
+
+In Linux 2.5 kernels (and later), USB device drivers have additional control
+over how DMA may be used to perform I/O operations. The APIs are detailed
+in the kernel usb programming guide (kerneldoc, from the source code).
+
+API overview
+============
+
+The big picture is that USB drivers can continue to ignore most DMA issues,
+though they still must provide DMA-ready buffers (see
+Documentation/core-api/dma-api-howto.rst). That's how they've worked through
+the 2.4 (and earlier) kernels, or they can now be DMA-aware.
+
+DMA-aware usb drivers:
+
+- New calls enable DMA-aware drivers, letting them allocate dma buffers and
+ manage dma mappings for existing dma-ready buffers (see below).
+
+- URBs have an additional "transfer_dma" field, as well as a transfer_flags
+ bit saying if it's valid. (Control requests also have "setup_dma", but
+ drivers must not use it.)
+
+- "usbcore" will map this DMA address, if a DMA-aware driver didn't do
+ it first and set ``URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP``. HCDs
+ don't manage dma mappings for URBs.
+
+- There's a new "generic DMA API", parts of which are usable by USB device
+ drivers. Never use dma_set_mask() on any USB interface or device; that
+ would potentially break all devices sharing that bus.
+
+Eliminating copies
+==================
+
+It's good to avoid making CPUs copy data needlessly. The costs can add up,
+and effects like cache-trashing can impose subtle penalties.
+
+- If you're doing lots of small data transfers from the same buffer all
+ the time, that can really burn up resources on systems which use an
+ IOMMU to manage the DMA mappings. It can cost MUCH more to set up and
+ tear down the IOMMU mappings with each request than perform the I/O!
+
+ For those specific cases, USB has primitives to allocate less expensive
+ memory. They work like kmalloc and kfree versions that give you the right
+ kind of addresses to store in urb->transfer_buffer and urb->transfer_dma.
+ You'd also set ``URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP`` in urb->transfer_flags::
+
+ void *usb_alloc_coherent (struct usb_device *dev, size_t size,
+ int mem_flags, dma_addr_t *dma);
+
+ void usb_free_coherent (struct usb_device *dev, size_t size,
+ void *addr, dma_addr_t dma);
+
+ Most drivers should **NOT** be using these primitives; they don't need
+ to use this type of memory ("dma-coherent"), and memory returned from
+ :c:func:`kmalloc` will work just fine.
+
+ The memory buffer returned is "dma-coherent"; sometimes you might need to
+ force a consistent memory access ordering by using memory barriers. It's
+ not using a streaming DMA mapping, so it's good for small transfers on
+ systems where the I/O would otherwise thrash an IOMMU mapping. (See
+ Documentation/core-api/dma-api-howto.rst for definitions of "coherent" and
+ "streaming" DMA mappings.)
+
+ Asking for 1/Nth of a page (as well as asking for N pages) is reasonably
+ space-efficient.
+
+ On most systems the memory returned will be uncached, because the
+ semantics of dma-coherent memory require either bypassing CPU caches
+ or using cache hardware with bus-snooping support. While x86 hardware
+ has such bus-snooping, many other systems use software to flush cache
+ lines to prevent DMA conflicts.
+
+- Devices on some EHCI controllers could handle DMA to/from high memory.
+
+ Unfortunately, the current Linux DMA infrastructure doesn't have a sane
+ way to expose these capabilities ... and in any case, HIGHMEM is mostly a
+ design wart specific to x86_32. So your best bet is to ensure you never
+ pass a highmem buffer into a USB driver. That's easy; it's the default
+ behavior. Just don't override it; e.g. with ``NETIF_F_HIGHDMA``.
+
+ This may force your callers to do some bounce buffering, copying from
+ high memory to "normal" DMA memory. If you can come up with a good way
+ to fix this issue (for x86_32 machines with over 1 GByte of memory),
+ feel free to submit patches.
+
+Working with existing buffers
+=============================
+
+Existing buffers aren't usable for DMA without first being mapped into the
+DMA address space of the device. However, most buffers passed to your
+driver can safely be used with such DMA mapping. (See the first section
+of Documentation/core-api/dma-api-howto.rst, titled "What memory is DMA-able?")
+
+- When you have the scatterlists which have been mapped for the USB controller,
+ you could use the new ``usb_sg_*()`` calls, which would turn scatterlist
+ into URBs::
+
+ int usb_sg_init(struct usb_sg_request *io, struct usb_device *dev,
+ unsigned pipe, unsigned period, struct scatterlist *sg,
+ int nents, size_t length, gfp_t mem_flags);
+
+ void usb_sg_wait(struct usb_sg_request *io);
+
+ void usb_sg_cancel(struct usb_sg_request *io);
+
+ When the USB controller doesn't support DMA, the ``usb_sg_init()`` would try
+ to submit URBs in PIO way as long as the page in scatterlists is not in the
+ Highmem, which could be very rare in modern architectures.