Coherently understand the software-hardware interaction with regard to DMA and buses

Question

I've gathered some level of knowledge on several components (including software and hardware) which are involved in general DMA transactions in ARM based boards, but I don't understand how is it all perfectly integrated, I didn't find a full coherent description about this.

I'll write down the high level of the knowledge I already have and I hope that someone could fix me where I'm wrong and complete the missing parts so the whole picture would be clear. My description starts with the userspace software and drills down to the hardware components. The misunderstood parts are in italic-bold format.

• The user-mode application requests to read/write from some device, i.e. makes I/O operation.
• The operating system receives the request and hand it to the appropriate driver (every OS has its own mechanism to do this, I don't need a further drill down here but if you want to share insights here you are welcome)
• The driver which is on charge to handle the I/O request, has to know the address to which the device is mapped to (since I'm interested in ARM based boards, afaik there is only memory-mapped I/O and no port I/O). In most of the cases (if we consider smartphone-like boards) there is a linux kernel that parses the devices addresses from the device-tree which is given from the bootloader at the boot time (the modern approach), or the linux is precompiled for the specific model family and board with the device addresses within it (hardcoded in its source code) (in older and obsolete? approach). In some cases (happens a lot in smartphones) part of the drivers are precompiled and are just packaged into the kernel, i.e. their source is closed, thus, the addresses correspond to the devices are unknown. Is it correct?
• Given that the driver knows the address of the relevant registers of the device it want to communicate with, it allocate a buffer (usually in the kernel space) to which the device would write its data (with the help of the DMA). The driver needs to inform the device about the location of that buffer, but the addresses that the devices work with (to manipulate memory) are different from the addresses that the drivers (cpu) work with, hence, the driver needs to inform the device about the 'bus address' of the buffer it has just allocated. How does the driver inform the device about that address? How popular is to use an IOMMU? when using IOMMU is there one hardware component that manages addressing or one per device?
• Then the driver commands the device to do its job (by manipulating its registers) and the device transfers output data directly to the allocated buffer in the memory. Here I'm confused a bit with the relation of device-driver:bus:bus-controller:actual-device. Take for example some imaginary device which knows to communicate in the I2C protocol; the SoC specify an I2C bus interface - what is this actually? does the I2C bus has some kind of bus controller? Does the cpu communicate with the I2C bus interface or directly with the device? (i.e. the I2C bus interface is seamless). I guess that someone with some experience with device drivers could answer this easily..
• The device populates a DMA channel. Since the device is not connected directly to the memory but rather is connected through some bus to the DMA controller (which masters the bus), it interacts with the DMA to transfer the required data to the allocated buffer in the memory. When the board vendor uses ARM IP cores and bus specifications then this step involves transactions over a bus from the AMBA spec (i.e. AHB/multi-AHB/AXI), and some protocol between the device and a DMAC on top of it. I would like to know more about this step, what actually happens? There are many specifications for DMA controller by ARM, which one is the popular? which is obsolete?
• When the device is done, it sends an interrupt, which travel to the OS through the interrupt controller, and the OS's interrupt handler direct it to the appropriate driver which now knows that the DMA transfer is completed.

Answer 1

You've slightly conflated two things here - there are some devices (e.g. UARTs, MMC controllers, audio controllers, typically lower-bandwidth devices) which rely on an external DMA controller ("DMA engine" in Linux terminology), but many devices are simply bus masters in their own right and perform their own DMA directly (e.g. GPUs, USB host controllers, and of course the DMA controllers themselves). The former involves a bunch of extra complexity with the CPU programming the DMA controller, so I'm going to ignore it and just consider straightforward bus-master DMA.

In a typical ARM SoC, the CPU clusters and other master peripherals, and the memory controller and other slave peripherals, are all connected together with various AMBA interconnects, forming a single "bus" (generally all mapped to the "platform bus" in Linux), over which masters address slaves according to the address maps of the interconnect. You can safely assume that the device drivers know (whether by device tree or hardcoded) where devices appear in the CPU's physical address map, because otherwise they'd be useless.

On simpler systems, there is a single address map, so the physical addresses used by the CPU to address RAM and peripherals can be freely shared with other masters as DMA addresses. Other systems are more complex - one of the more well-known is the Raspberry Pi's BCM2835, in which the CPU and GPU have different address maps; e.g. the interconnect is hard-wired such that where the GPU sees peripherals at "bus address" 0x7e000000, the CPU sees them at "physical address" 0x20000000. Furthermore, in LPAE systems with 40-bit physical addresses, the interconnect might need to provide different views to different masters - e.g. in the TI Keystone 2 SoCs, all the DRAM is above the 32-bit boundary from the CPUs' point of view, so the 32-bit DMA masters would be useless if the interconnect didn't show them a different addresses map. For Linux, check out the dma-ranges device tree property for how such CPU→bus translations are described. The CPU must take these translations into account when telling a master to access a particular RAM or peripheral address; Linux drivers should be using the DMA mapping API which provides appropriately-translated DMA addresses.

IOMMUs provide more flexibility than fixed interconnect offsets - typically, addresses can be remapped dynamically, and for system integrity masters can be prevented from accessing any addresses other than those mapped for DMA at any given time. Furthermore, in an LPAE or AArch64 system with more than 4GB of RAM, an IOMMU becomes necessary if a 32-bit peripheral needs to be able to access buffers anywhere in RAM. You'll see IOMMUs on a lot of the current 64-bit systems for the purpose of integrating legacy 32-bit devices, but they are also increasingly popular for the purpose of device virtualisation.

IOMMU topology depends on the system and the IOMMUs in use - the system I'm currently working with has 7 separate ARM MMU-401/400 devices in front of individual bus-master peripherals; the ARM MMU-500 on the other hand can be implemented as a single system-wide device with a separate TLB for each master; other vendors have their own designs. Either way, from a Linux perspective, most device drivers should be using the aforementioned DMA mapping API to allocate and prepare physical buffers for DMA, which will also automatically set up the appropriate IOMMU mappings if the device is attached to one. That way, individual device drivers need not care about the presence of an IOMMU or not. Other drivers (typically GPU drivers) however, depend on an IOMMU and want complete control, so manage the mappings directly via the IOMMU API. Essentially, the IOMMU's page tables are set up to map certain ranges of physical addresses^* to ranges of I/O virtual addresses, those IOVAs are given to the device as DMA (i.e. bus) addresses, and the IOMMU translates the IOVAs back to physical addresses as the device accesses them. Once the DMA operation is finished, the driver typically removes the IOMMU mapping, both to free up IOVA space and so that the device no longer has access to RAM.

Note that in some cases the DMA transfer is cyclic and never "finishes". With something like a display controller, the CPU might just map a buffer for DMA, pass that address to the controller and trigger it to start, and it will then continuously perform DMA reads to scan out whatever the CPU writes to that buffer until it is told to stop.

Other peripheral buses beyond the SoC interconnect, like I²C/SPI/USB/etc. work as you suspect - there is a bus controller (which is itself a device on the AMBA bus, so any of the above might apply to it) with its own device driver. In a crude generalisation, the CPU doesn't communicate directly with devices on the external bus - where a driver for an AMBA device says "write X to register Y", that just happens by the CPU performing a store to a memory-mapped address; where an I²C device driver says "write X to register Y", the OS usually has some bus abstraction layer which the bus controller driver implements, whereby the CPU programs the controller with a command saying "write X to register Y on device Z", the bus controller hardware will go off and do that, then notify the OS of the peripheral device's response via an interrupt or some other means.

_{* technically, the IOMMU itself, being more or less "just another device", could have a different address map in the interconnect as previously described, but I would doubt the sanity of anyone actually building a system like that.}