de-dma uaudio

[Alexander Leidinger]

Julian Elischer <julian at elischer.org> wrote:

> The low hardware layer already does DMA to move data out of the
> hardware to memory.  The data gets copied from the user layer to an 
> intermediate
> buffer and from there to the DMA buffers. There is no need to 
> allocate DMA capable
> buffers for the intermediate layer.

I understand this as:
  userland-mem -> kernel-mem -> dma-able-mem -> hardware

So there's no zero-copy behavior?
  userland-mem -> in-kernel-dma-able-mem -> hardware
or
  userland-mem -> if(is_dmaable(userland-mem)) -> hardware
                  else -> in-kernel-dma-able-mem -> hardware

While the amount of memory used as a sound buffer isn't that much for todays
standards, it's still a memory transfer operation which could be avoided. I
don't know how much it would affect the latency (or if it affects it at
all), but not doing things which aren't necesssary/beneficial is always a
win (in some way) in my experience.

Bye,
Alexander.

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