Writing Device Drivers

Types of Device DMA

Devices perform one of the following three types of DMA.

Bus-Master DMA

If the device is capable of acting as a true bus master (where the DMA engine resides on the device board), the driver should program the device's DMA registers directly. The transfer address and count are obtained from the DMA cookie and given to the device.

Third-party DMA

Third-party DMA utilizes a system DMA engine resident on the main system board, which has several DMA channels available for use by devices. The device relies on the system's DMA engine to perform the data transfers between the device and memory. The driver uses DMA engine routines (see ddi_dmae(9F)) to initialize and program the DMA engine. For each DMA data transfer, the driver programs the DMA engine and then gives the device a command to initiate the transfer in cooperation with that engine.

First-party DMA

Under first-party DMA, the device drives its own DMA bus cycles using a channel from the system's DMA engine. The ddi_dmae_1stparty(9F) function is used to configure this channel in a cascade mode so that the DMA engine will not interfere with the transfer.