Re: RFC bus_dma_tag_parent

[Chuck Tuffli <chuck_tuffli@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

ok, I'm confused ...

On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 07:40:42PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 09:44:39AM -0800, Chuck Tuffli wrote:
> >     parent_dmat = bus_dma_tag_parent(dev);
> 
> parent_dmat = bus_dma_tag_parent(dev, lowaddr, highaddr, maxsegments);

is the intent of the {low,high}addr and maxsegments parameters to
define the properties of the parent tag? the object oriented nature of
bus_dma would have made me think the bus (PCI, ISA, USB, etc), being
the "base class", would define the {low,high}addr and maxsegments
values and not burden each driver with knowing the specifics of the
bus hierarchy.

> >     bus_dma_tag_create(parent_dmat, ..., &mybuffer_dmat);
> > 
> > What kind of situations would specifying the max number of segments be
> > useful?
> 
> This is useful if the bus DMA engine supports scatter/gather itself.
> This can be done IIRC on the Alpha, maybe on other architectures too.
> I don't mind if we have a UNKNOWN value, e.g. 0. This is not a problem
> here, but for many drivers we know this in advantage and it might be
> used to allocate the segment maps in the parent tag.
> 
> Joerg

so what you are saying is on these architectures there can be multiple
parent tags differentiated by the address range and number of
segments? even in this case, wouldn't there be an advantage to lazy
allocation of segment maps? in this case, the maps aren't committed
until the driver makes the subsequent calls to
bus_dma_tag_create(parent_dmat, ...)

don't take any of the above as an objection to adding the parameters -
it's more my way of making sure i understand what to code.

-- 
Chuck Tuffli
Agilent Technologies