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Using Packet-Based Bus-Master DMA

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To use packet-based DMA, drivers of bus-master DMA devices call the following general sequence of support routines as they process an IRP requesting a DMA transfer:

  • KeFlushIoBuffers just before attempting to allocate map registers for a transfer request (for more information, see Maintaining Cache Coherency)

  • AllocateAdapterChannel when the driver is ready to program the bus-master adapter for DMA

  • MmGetMdlVirtualAddress to get an index into the MDL, required as an initial parameter to MapTransfer, and MapTransfer to make the system physical memory that backs the IRP's buffer device-accessible

    Note that any driver might need to carry out more than one transfer operation in order to satisfy the current IRP, as explained in Splitting Transfer Requests. Drivers of devices that do not have scatter/gather capabilities can call MapTransfer once per transfer operation. Drivers of devices that have scatter/gather capabilities can call MapTransfer more than once to set up each transfer operation. Alternatively, these drivers can use the system's built-in scatter/gather support, described in Using Scatter/Gather DMA.

  • FlushAdapterBuffers at the end of each DMA transfer operation to/from the target device, in order to determine whether all the requested data has been completely transferred

  • FreeMapRegisters as soon as all DMA operations for the current IRP are done, because all the requested data has been completely transferred or because the driver must fail the IRP due to a device or bus I/O error

The adapter object pointer returned by IoGetDmaAdapter is a required parameter to AllocateAdapterChannel, MapTransfer, FlushAdapterBuffers, and FreeMapRegisters. Note that in versions of Windows NT prior to Windows 2000, bus-master devices could pass a NULL adapter object pointer to MapTransfer and FlushAdapterBuffers. In Windows 2000 and later, drivers can no longer do so.

KeFlushIoBuffers and MmGetMdlVirtualAddress require a pointer to the MDL at Irp->MdlAddress.

Individual drivers call this sequence of support routines at different points, depending on how each driver is implemented to service its device. For example, one driver's StartIo routine might make the call to AllocateAdapterChannel, while another driver might make this call from a routine that removes IRPs from a driver-created interlocked queue or device queue.

Instead of using the routines described in this section, any driver that uses packet-based DMA can use support routines intended to streamline scatter/gather DMA, regardless of whether its device has built-in scatter/gather support. See Using Scatter/Gather DMA for details.