DMAEngine Documentation: Work (finally) in Progress

While developping a DMA controller driver for the Allwinner A31 SoCs (that eventually got merged in the 3.17 kernel), I’ve realised how under-documented the DMAEngine kernel subsystem was, especially for a newcomer like I was.

After discussing this with a few other kernel developers in the same situation, I finally started to work on such a documentation during the summer, and ended up submitting it at the end of July. As you might expect, it triggered a lot of questions, comments and discussions that enhanced a lot the documentation itself but also pointed out some inconsistencies in the API, obscure areas or just enhancements.

This also triggered an effort to clean up these areas, and hopefully, a lot more will follow, allowing to eventually clean up the framework as a whole.

And the good thing is that this documentation has been merged by the DMAEngine maintainer and is visible in linux-next, feel free to read it, and enhance it!

Author: Maxime Ripard

Maxime Ripard was an engineer at Bootlin between 2011 and 2019. More details...

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