Re: Is sendfile all that sexy?

[Roman Zippel]

Hi,

On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Now, there are things to look out for: when you do these kinds of dummy
> "struct page" tricks, some macros etc WILL NOT WORK. In particular, we do
> not currently have a good "page_to_bus/phys()" function. That means that
> anybody trying to do DMA to this page is currently screwed, simply because
> he has no good way of getting the physical address.
> 
> This is a limitation in general: the PTE access functions would also like
> to have "page_to_phys()" and "phys_to_page()" functions. It gets even
> worse with IO mappings, where "CPU-physical" is NOT necessarily the same
> as "bus-physical".

That's why I want to avoid dummy struct page and use a real mem_map
instead. I have two options:
1. I map everything together in one mem_map, like it's still done for
m68k, the overhead here is in the phys_to_virt()/virt_to_phys() function.
2. I use several nodes like mips64/arm and virt_to_page() gets more
complex, but this usually assumes a specific memory layout to keep it
fast.
Once that problem is solved, I can manage the memory on the card like the
main memory and use it however I want. I probably do something like ia64
and use the highest bits as an offset into a table.

bye, Roman