On Wednesday 17 December 2014 01:24:42 Laurent Pinchart wrote:
If we forbid the IOMMU driver from being compiled as a module can't we just rely on deferred probing ? The bus master driver will just be reprobed after the IOMMU gets probed, like for other devices.
This could fail in case the IOMMU device permanently fails to probe. There would be something very wrong in the system in that case, Enabling the bus masters totally transparently without IOMMU support could not be such a good idea.
I believe in the majority of cases today, the IOMMU is entirely optional. There are valid reasons for not including the IOMMU driver in the kernel, e.g. when you know that all the machines with that driver can DMA to all of their RAM and you want to avoid the overhead of IOTLB misses.
Arnd