[RFC PATCH 3/5] mm/vma: add support for peer to peer to device vma

[Logan Gunthorpe]

On 2019-01-29 4:47 p.m., Jerome Glisse wrote:
> The whole point is to allow to use device memory for range of virtual
> address of a process when it does make sense to use device memory for
> that range. So they are multiple cases where it does make sense:
> [1] - Only the device is accessing the range and they are no CPU access
>       For instance the program is executing/running a big function on
>       the GPU and they are not concurrent CPU access, this is very
>       common in all the existing GPGPU code. In fact AFAICT It is the
>       most common pattern. So here you can use HMM private or public
>       memory.
> [2] - Both device and CPU access a common range of virtul address
>       concurrently. In that case if you are on a platform with cache
>       coherent inter-connect like OpenCAPI or CCIX then you can use
>       HMM public device memory and have both access the same memory.
>       You can not use HMM private memory.
> 
> So far on x86 we only have PCIE and thus so far on x86 we only have
> private HMM device memory that is not accessible by the CPU in any
> way.

I feel like you're just moving the rug out from under us... Before you
said ignore HMM and I was asking about the use case that wasn't using
HMM and how it works without HMM. In response, you just give me *way*
too much information describing HMM. And still, as best as I can see,
managing DMA mappings (which is different from the userspace mappings)
for GPU P2P should be handled by HMM and the userspace mappings should
*just* link VMAs to HMM pages using the standard infrastructure we
already have.

>> And what struct pages are actually going to be backing these VMAs if
>> it's not using HMM?
> 
> When you have some range of virtual address migrated to HMM private
> memory then the CPU pte are special swap entry and they behave just
> as if the memory was swapped to disk. So CPU access to those will
> fault and trigger a migration back to main memory.

This isn't answering my question at all... I specifically asked what is
backing the VMA when we are *not* using HMM.

Logan