Problems with dma_alloc_coherent()

[Tom Rini]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 10:59:56AM -0500, John Whitney wrote:

> In the process of reworking my Generic DMA core for the 2.6 kernel, I
> noticed that dma_alloc_coherent() returns NULL in all cases on a
> cache-coherent platform.  Instead, I think it would be better if this
> routine returned a block of contiguous memory (not cache-inhibited), as
> pci_alloc_consistent() does.
>
> To that end, I am submitting the attached patch which modifies
> dma_alloc_coherent() and dma_free_coherent() to do just this for
> cache-coherent platforms.
> I was going to add a check for dev->dma_mask in dma_alloc_coherent()
> (to add GFP_DMA to the flags), but the dma_supported() macro always
> returns 1, which would indicate that this is superfluous.

I'd like to suggest that what we do is make dma_alloc_coherent and
dma_free_coherent steal the logic of pci_alloc/free_consistent outright,
moving us one step closer to using <asm-generic/pci-dma-compat.h> (PCI
DMA API implemented in terms of the generic DMA API).

--
Tom Rini
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/

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