On 05/03/2013 07:09 AM, Andres Freund wrote: > We've got that in 9.3 which is absolutely fabulous! But that's not > related to doing DMA which you cannot (and should not!) do from > userspace. You can do zero-copy DMA directly into userspace buffers. It requires root (or suitable capabilities that land up equivalent to root anyway) and requires driver support, and it's often a terrible idea, but it's possible. It's used by a lot of embedded systems, by infiniband, and (if I vaguely recall correctly) by things like video4linux drivers. You can use get_user_pages and set the write flag. Linux Device Drivers chapter 15 discusses it.
That said, I think some of the earlier parts of this discussion confused direct asynchronous I/O with DMA. Within-kernel DMA may be (ok, is) used to implement DIO, but that doesn't mean you're DMA'ing directly into userspace buffers. -- Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
