Hi There,

I am developing a driver for a communication card in linux. The working of the driver is as follows:

The data has to be transferred from user space memory to some memory on a particular PCI card. This card is having the PLX PCI 9054 with a DMA controller.

If I have to pass the data from the user program to the PCI Memory, the data has to be first passed from user space to the kernel space and then from there to the PCI Memory. This is resulting in a lot of bandwidth wastage.

Is it possible for a kernel module to access the user space memory directly, so that I can transfer the data directly from the userspace to the PCI memory.

Thank You.

I think it was that a module like the video frame buffer uses a piece of memory into which the userspace can write and which will not be copied but rather used directly for the transfer to the video device.

isn't that what DMA is for?? i haven't reached that chapter in 'linux device drivers' yet, but i think that's what it does. or maybe u can mmap() it?

Not sure how far you got meanwhile but here some comments:
What you want is a common problem and there are solutiuons.
In order to do DMA to or from user space several problems must be solved:
first: DMA is done on physical addresses, while user (and actually even kernel) memory is looked at through virtual addresses. The next issue is that virtual memory is organized in pages of physical memory that are not necessary consecutive. This means you need to break down the DMA in chunks or use hardware that can do this for you, such as the PLX 9054 (scatter gather DMA ) Finally, the physical pages may be moved around by the system. To prevent this from occuring during a DMA, the pages must be locked in physical memory. For all the issues there are kernel routines but it is not so easy to do. Moreover, it can be unsafe if you don't take great care. This is why the classic approach is done with all the memory copying. Nevertheless, I also would like to get a 9054 driver going. If you are serious, give it a try and I help where I can.

Mick