On Friday 02 September 2011, Clark, Rob wrote:
Imho the appeal of this is that there's no preferred party of a shared buffer (the one the buffer originated from and allocated it), but that is handled by the dma core (and some platform specific magic for really weird cases).
We could even go so far and make the dma_buf creation a real syscall instead of shoving it into some random ioctls.
hmm, I don't quite get why making it a syscall would help..
It was indeed one of the main drivers for the current design to have no specific way to create a dma buffer but to let every subsystem handle it in its own way. That doesn't prevent you from adding a chardev, file system or syscall that only has the purpose of creating dma buffers, but it should not be essential to have that.
Arnd