docs: infiniband: convert docs to ReST and rename to *.rst

[linux-2.6-microblaze.git] / Documentation / infiniband / user_verbs.txt

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-USERSPACE VERBS ACCESS
-
-  The ib_uverbs module, built by enabling CONFIG_INFINIBAND_USER_VERBS,
-  enables direct userspace access to IB hardware via "verbs," as
-  described in chapter 11 of the InfiniBand Architecture Specification.
-
-  To use the verbs, the libibverbs library, available from
-  https://github.com/linux-rdma/rdma-core, is required. libibverbs contains a
-  device-independent API for using the ib_uverbs interface.
-  libibverbs also requires appropriate device-dependent kernel and
-  userspace driver for your InfiniBand hardware.  For example, to use
-  a Mellanox HCA, you will need the ib_mthca kernel module and the
-  libmthca userspace driver be installed.
-
-User-kernel communication
-
-  Userspace communicates with the kernel for slow path, resource
-  management operations via the /dev/infiniband/uverbsN character
-  devices.  Fast path operations are typically performed by writing
-  directly to hardware registers mmap()ed into userspace, with no
-  system call or context switch into the kernel.
-
-  Commands are sent to the kernel via write()s on these device files.
-  The ABI is defined in drivers/infiniband/include/ib_user_verbs.h.
-  The structs for commands that require a response from the kernel
-  contain a 64-bit field used to pass a pointer to an output buffer.
-  Status is returned to userspace as the return value of the write()
-  system call.
-
-Resource management
-
-  Since creation and destruction of all IB resources is done by
-  commands passed through a file descriptor, the kernel can keep track
-  of which resources are attached to a given userspace context.  The
-  ib_uverbs module maintains idr tables that are used to translate
-  between kernel pointers and opaque userspace handles, so that kernel
-  pointers are never exposed to userspace and userspace cannot trick
-  the kernel into following a bogus pointer.
-
-  This also allows the kernel to clean up when a process exits and
-  prevent one process from touching another process's resources.
-
-Memory pinning
-
-  Direct userspace I/O requires that memory regions that are potential
-  I/O targets be kept resident at the same physical address.  The
-  ib_uverbs module manages pinning and unpinning memory regions via
-  get_user_pages() and put_page() calls.  It also accounts for the
-  amount of memory pinned in the process's pinned_vm, and checks that
-  unprivileged processes do not exceed their RLIMIT_MEMLOCK limit.
-
-  Pages that are pinned multiple times are counted each time they are
-  pinned, so the value of pinned_vm may be an overestimate of the
-  number of pages pinned by a process.
-
-/dev files
-
-  To create the appropriate character device files automatically with
-  udev, a rule like
-
-    KERNEL=="uverbs*", NAME="infiniband/%k"
-
-  can be used.  This will create device nodes named
-
-    /dev/infiniband/uverbs0
-
-  and so on.  Since the InfiniBand userspace verbs should be safe for
-  use by non-privileged processes, it may be useful to add an
-  appropriate MODE or GROUP to the udev rule.