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Direct memory access
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Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of modern computers and microprocessors that allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory for reading and/or writing independently of the central processing unit. Many hardware systems use DMA including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards, sound cards and GPUs. DMA is also used for intra-chip data transfer in multi-core processors, especially in multiprocessor system-on-chips, where its processing element is equipped with a local memory (often called scratchpad memory) and DMA is used for transferring data between the local memory and the main memory.
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Encyclopedia
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of modern computers and microprocessors that allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory for reading and/or writing independently of the central processing unit. Many hardware systems use DMA including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards, sound cards and GPUs. DMA is also used for intra-chip data transfer in multi-core processors, especially in multiprocessor system-on-chips, where its processing element is equipped with a local memory (often called scratchpad memory) and DMA is used for transferring data between the local memory and the main memory. Computers that have DMA channels can transfer data to and from devices with much less CPU overhead than computers without a DMA channel. Similarly a processing element inside a multi-core processor can transfer data to and from its local memory without occupying its processor time, overlapping computation and data transfer.
Without DMA, using programmed input/output (PIO) mode for communication with peripheral devices, or load/store instructions in the case of multicore chips, the CPU is typically fully occupied for the entire duration of the read or write operation, and is thus unavailable to perform other work. With DMA, the CPU would initiate the transfer, do other operations while the transfer is in progress, and receive an interrupt from the DMA controller once the operation has been done. This is especially useful in real-time computing applications where not stalling behind concurrent operations is critical. Another and related application area is various forms of stream processing where it is essential to have data processing and transfer in parallel, in order to achieve sufficient throughput.
Principle
DMA is an essential feature of all modern computers, as it allows devices to transfer data without subjecting the CPU to a heavy overhead. Otherwise, the CPU would have to copy each piece of data from the source to the destination, making it unavailable for other tasks. This situation is aggravated because access to I/O devices over a peripheral bus is generally slower than normal system RAM. With DMA, the CPU gets freed from this overhead and can do useful tasks during data transfer (though the CPU bus would be partly blocked by DMA). In the same way, a DMA engine in an embedded processor allows its processing element to issue a data transfer and carries on its own task while the data transfer is being performed.
A DMA transfer copies a block of memory from one device to another. While the CPU initiates the transfer by issuing a DMA command, it does not execute it. For so-called "third party" DMA, as is normally used with the ISA bus, the transfer is performed by a DMA controller which is typically part of the motherboard chipset. More advanced bus designs such as PCI typically use bus mastering DMA, where the device takes control of the bus and performs the transfer itself. In an embedded processor or multiprocessor system-on-chip, it is a DMA engine connected to the on-chip bus that actually administers the transfer of the data, in coordination with the flow control mechanisms of the on-chip bus.
A typical usage of DMA is copying a block of memory from system RAM to or from a buffer on the device. Such an operation does not stall the processor, which as a result can be scheduled to perform other tasks. DMA is essential to high performance embedded systems. It is also essential in providing so-called zero-copy implementations of peripheral device drivers as well as functionalities such as network packet routing, audio playback and streaming video. Multicore embedded processors (in the form of multiprocessor system-on-chip) often use one or more DMA engines in combination with scratchpad memories for both increased efficiency and lower power consumption. In computer clusters for high-performance computing, DMA among multiple computing nodes is often used under the name of remote DMA.
Cache coherency problem
DMA can lead to cache coherency problems. Imagine a CPU equipped with a cache and an external memory that can be accessed directly by devices using DMA. When the CPU accesses location X in the memory, the current value will be stored in the cache. Subsequent operations on X will update the cached copy of X, but not the external memory version of X. If the cache is not flushed to the memory before the next time a device tries to access X, the device will receive a stale value of X.
Similarly, if the cached copy of X is not invalidated when a device writes a new value to the memory, then the CPU will operate on a stale value of X.
This issue can be addressed in one of two ways in system design: Cache-coherent systems implement a method in hardware whereby external writes are signaled to the cache controller which then invalidates (for DMA reads) or flushes (for DMA writes) the cache lines in question. Non-coherent systems leave this to software, where the OS must then ensure that the cache lines are flushed before an outgoing DMA transfer is started and invalidated before a memory range affected by an incoming DMA transfer is accessed. The OS must make sure that the memory range is not accessed by any running threads in the meantime. The latter approach introduces some overhead to the DMA operation, as most hardware requires a loop to invalidate each cache line individually.
Hybrids also exist, where the secondary L2 cache is coherent while the L1 cache (typically on-CPU) is managed by software.
DMA engine
In addition to hardware interaction, DMA can also be used to offload expensive memory operations, such as large copies or scatter-gather operations, from the CPU to a dedicated DMA engine
Examples
ISA
For example, a PC's ISA DMA controller is based on the Intel 8237 Multimode DMA controller, that is a software-hardware combination which either consists of or emulates this part. In the first edition of ISA, also known as the PC/XT, there was only one DMA controller capable of providing four DMA channels (numbered 0-3). These DMA channels performed 8-bit transfers and could only address the first megabyte of RAM. With the Intel 80286, a second DMA controller, was added (channels 5-7; channel 4 is unusable), it was rewired to be able to address the full 286 memory address space of 16 MB. This second controller performed 16-bit transfers.
Due to their lagging performance (2.5 Mbit/s), these devices have been largely obsolete since the advent of the 80386 processor and its capacity for 32-bit transfers. They are still supported to the extent they are required to support built-in legacy PC hardware on modern machines.
Each DMA channel has a 16-bit address register and a 16-bit count register associated with it. To initiate a data transfer the device driver sets up the DMA channel's address and count registers together with the direction of the data transfer, read or write. It then instructs the DMA hardware to begin the transfer. When the transfer is complete, the device interrupts the CPU.
Scatter-gather DMA allows the transfer of data to and from multiple memory areas in a single DMA transaction. It is equivalent to the chaining together of multiple simple DMA requests. The motivation is to off-load multiple input/output interrupt and data copy tasks from the CPU.
DRQ stands for DMA request; DACK for DMA acknowledge. These symbols, seen on hardware schematics of computer systems with DMA functionality, represent electronic signaling lines between the CPU and DMA controller. Each DMA channel has one Request and one Acknowledge line. A properly configured device that uses DMA must be jumpered (or software-configured) to use both lines of the assigned DMA channel.
Standard ISA DMA assignments:
- 0 DRAM Refresh (obsolete),
- 1 User hardware,
- 2 Floppy disk controller,
- 3 Hard disk (obsoleted by PIO modes, and replaced by UDMA modes),
- 4 Cascade from XT DMA controller,
- 5 Hard Disk (PS/2 only), user hardware for all others,
- 6 User hardware,
- 7 User hardware.
PCI
As mentioned above, a PCI architecture has no central DMA controller, unlike ISA. Instead, any PCI component can request control of the bus ("become the bus master") and request to read and write from the system memory. More precisely, a PCI component requests bus ownership from the PCI bus controller (usually the southbridge in a modern PC design), which will arbitrate if several devices request bus ownership simultaneously, since there can only be one bus master at one time. When the component is granted ownership, it will issue normal read and write commands on the PCI bus, which will be claimed by the bus controller and forwarded to the memory controller using a scheme which is specific to every chipset.
As an example, on a modern AMD Socket AM2-based PC, the southbridge will forward the transactions to the northbridge (which is integrated on the CPU die) using HyperTransport, which will in turn convert them to DDR2 operations and send them out on the DDR2 memory bus. As can be seen, there are quite a number of steps involved in a PCI DMA transfer; however, that poses little problem, since the PCI device or PCI bus itself are an order of magnitude slower than rest of components (see list of device bandwidths).
A modern x86 CPU may use more than 4 GB of memory, utilizing PAE, a 36-bit addressing mode. In such a case, a device using DMA with a 32-bit address bus is unable to address memory above the 4 GB line. The new Double Address Cycle (DAC) mechanism, if implemented on both the PCI bus and the device itself, enables 64-bit DMA addressing. Otherwise, the operating system would need to work around the problem by using costly double buffers (Windows nomenclature) also known as bounce buffers (Linux).
IO Accelerator in Xeon
As an example of DMA engine incorporated in a general-purpose CPU, newer Intel Xeon chipsets include a DMA engine technology called I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT), meant to improve network performance on high-throughput network interfaces, in particular gigabit Ethernet and faster. However, various benchmarks with this approach by Intel's Linux kernel developer Andrew Grover indicate no more than 10% improvement in CPU utilization with receiving workloads, and no improvement when transmitting data.
AHB
In systems-on-a-chip and embedded systems, typical system bus infrastructure is a complex on-chip bus such as AMBA AHB. AMBA defines two kinds of AHB components: master and slave. A slave interface is similar to programmed I/O through which the software (running on embedded CPU, e.g. ARM) can write/read I/O registers or (less commonly) local memory blocks inside the device. A master interface can be used by the device to perform DMA transactions to/from system memory without heavily loading the CPU.
Therefore high bandwidth devices such as network controllers that need to transfer huge amounts of data to/from system memory will have two interface adapters to the AHB bus: a master and a slave interface. This is because on-chip buses like AHB do not support tri-stating the bus or alternating the direction of any line on the bus. Like PCI, no central DMA controller is required since the DMA is bus-mastering, but an arbiter is required in case of multiple masters present on the system.
Internally, a multichannel DMA engine is usually present in the device to perform multiple concurrent scatter-gather operations as programmed by the software.
Cell
As an example usage of DMA in a multiprocessor-system-on-chip,
IBM/Sony/Toshiba's Cell processor incorporates a DMA engine for each of its 9 processing elements including one power-processor element (PPE) and eight synergistic processor elements (SPEs). Since
the SPE's load/store instructions can read/write only its own local memory, an SPE entirely depends on DMAs to transfer data to and from the main memory and local memories of other SPEs. Thus the DMA acts as a primary means of data transfer among cores inside this CPU (in contrast to cache-coherent CMP architectures such as Intel's coming general-purpose GPU, Larrabee).
DMA in Cell is fully cache coherent (note however local stores of SPEs operated upon by DMA do not act as globally coherent cache in the standard sense). In both read ("get") and write ("put"), a DMA command can transfer either a single block area of size up to 16KB, or a list of 2 to 2048 such blocks. The DMA command is issued by specifying a pair of a local address and a remote address: for example when a SPE program issues a put DMA command, it specifies an address of its own local memory as the source and a virtual memory address (pointing to either the main memory or the local memory of another SPE) as the target, together with a block size. According to a recent experiment, an effective peak performance of DMA in Cell (3 GHz, under uniform traffic) reaches 200GB per second.
See also
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