bus_dma (9). What exactly means "Loading of memory allocation" ?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 12:45 AM, Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Sergey Babkin <babkin at verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>>   If I remember correctly, loading means that the pages become mapped
>>   and visible to the devices. Some buses can access only a limited
>>   address space , like ISA has only a 24-bit address. When a map gets
>>   loaded, for any pages outside of this range the temporary in-ramge
>>   pages are allocated and the d ata gets moved through them. On some
>>   machines, like I think DEC Alpha, the  physicall addresses seen by
>>   the devices are not the same as seen by the CPU , these need to be
>>   translated. And so on.
>>   I think my real old articl e had some of these explanations but now
>>   the Daemonnews site seems to be re al slow:
>>   http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200008/isa.html
>>   -SB
>>   (sorry a bout top quoting, it's the only kind the web interface of my
>>   provider suppo rts)
>>   Feb 1, 2009 03:38:27 PM, [1]bsd.quest at googlemail.com  wrote:
>>
>>      Hi,
>>     at first the cut of text from man (9) bus_dma:
>>     bus_dmamap_t
>>      A machine-dependent opaque type describing an individual
>>     mapp ing.
>>     One map is used for each memory allocation that will b e loaded.
>>     Maps can be reused once they have been unloaded.. .
>>     Question: What exactly means "Loading of memory allocation" in thi     s context
>>     ?
>>     Could anyone explain it or give me some little example wi th DMA
>>     functions
>>     for understanding it.
>
> Unfortunately it's bad English, so that might be where some of the
> confusion is stemming from. I'll send a doc's PR request after this to
> fix it.
> -Garrett

Ugh. Nevermind. The question was written improperly -- the manpage wasn't ><.
-Garrett