IBV_ADVISE_MR(3)

NAME
ibv_advise_mr - Gives advice or directions to the kernel about an address range belongs to a memory region (MR).

SYNOPSIS

        #include <infiniband/verbs.h>

        int ibv_advise_mr(struct ibv_pd *pd,
                  enum ibv_advise_mr_advice advice,
                  uint32_t flags,
                  struct ibv_sge *sg_list,
                  uint32_t num_sge)

DESCRIPTION
ibv_advise_mr() Give advice or directions to the kernel about an address range belonging to a memory region (MR). Applications that are aware of future access patterns can use this verb in order to leverage this knowledge to improve system or application performance.

Conventional advice values

IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH
    Pre-fetch a range of an on-demand paging MR. Make pages present with read-only permission before the actual IO is conducted. This would provide a way to reduce latency by overlapping paging-in and either compute time or IO to other ranges.

IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH_WRITE
    Like IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH but with read-access and write-access permission to the fetched memory.

IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH_NO_FAULT
    Pre-fetch a range of an on-demand paging MR without faulting. This allows presented pages in the CPU to become presented to the device.

ARGUMENTS

pd  The protection domain (PD) associated with the MR.

advice
    The requested advise value (as listed above).

flags
    Describes the properties of the advise operation Conventional advice values IBV_ADVISE_MR_FLAG_FLUSH : Request to be a synchronized operation. Return to the caller after the operation is completed.

sg_list
    Pointer to the s/g array When using IBV_ADVISE_OP_PREFETCH advise value, all the lkeys of all the scatter gather elements (SGEs) must be associated with ODP MRs (MRs that were registered with IBV_ACCESS_ON_DEMAND).

num_sge
    Number of elements in the s/g array

RETURN VALUE
ibv_advise_mr() returns 0 when the call was successful, or the value of errno on failure (which indicates the failure reason).

EOPNOTSUPP
    libibverbs or provider driver doesn’t support the ibv_advise_mr() verb (ENOSYS may sometimes be returned by old versions of libibverbs).

ENOTSUP
    The advise operation isn’t supported.

EFAULT
    In one of the following: o When the range requested is out of the MR bounds, or when parts of it are not part of the process address space. o One of the lkeys provided in the scatter gather list is invalid or with wrong write access.

EINVAL
    In one of the following: o The PD is invalid. o The flags are invalid. o The requested address doesn’t belong to a MR, but a MW or something.

EPERM
    In one of the following: o Referencing a valid lkey outside the caller’s security scope. o The advice is IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH_WRITE but the specified MR in the scatter gather list is not registered as writable access.

ENOENT
    The providing lkeys aren’t consistent with the MR’s.

ENOMEM
    Not enough memory. # NOTES

An application may pre-fetch any address range within an ODP MR when using the IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH or IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH_WRITE advice. Semantically, this operation is best-effort. That means the kernel does not guarantee that underlying pages are updated in the HCA or the pre-fetched pages would remain resident.

When using IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH or IBV_ADVISE_MR_ADVICE_PREFETCH_WRITE advice, the operation will be done in the following stages: o Page in the user pages to memory (pages aren’t pinned). o Get the dma mapping of these user pages. o Post the underlying page translations to the HCA.

If IBV_ADVISE_MR_FLAG_FLUSH is specified then the underlying pages are guaranteed to be updated in the HCA before returning SUCCESS. Otherwise the driver can choose to postpone the posting of the new translations to the HCA. When performing a local RDMA access operation it is recommended to use IBV_ADVISE_MR_FLAG_FLUSH flag with one of the pre-fetch advices to increase probability that the pages translations are valid in the HCA and avoid future page faults.

SEE ALSO
ibv_reg_mr(3), ibv_rereg_mr(3), ibv_dereg_mr(3)

AUTHOR
Aviad Yehezkel aviadye@mellanox.com