In Linux 2.5 kernels (and later), USB device drivers have additional controlover how DMA may be used to perform I/O operations.  The APIs are detailedin the kernel usb programming guide (kerneldoc, from the source code).API OVERVIEWThe big picture is that USB drivers can continue to ignore most DMA issues,though they still must provide DMA-ready buffers (see DMA-mapping.txt).That's how they've worked through the 2.4 (and earlier) kernels.OR:  they can now be DMA-aware.- New calls enable DMA-aware drivers, letting them allocate dma buffers and  manage dma mappings for existing dma-ready buffers (see below).- URBs have an additional "transfer_dma" field, as well as a transfer_flags  bit saying if it's valid.  (Control requests also have "setup_dma" and a  corresponding transfer_flags bit.)- "usbcore" will map those DMA addresses, if a DMA-aware driver didn't do  it first and set URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP or URB_NO_SETUP_DMA_MAP.  HCDs  don't manage dma mappings for URBs.- There's a new "generic DMA API", parts of which are usable by USB device  drivers.  Never use dma_set_mask() on any USB interface or device; that  would potentially break all devices sharing that bus.ELIMINATING COPIESIt's good to avoid making CPUs copy data needlessly.  The costs can add up,and effects like cache-trashing can impose subtle penalties.- If you're doing lots of small data transfers from the same buffer all  the time, that can really burn up resources on systems which use an  IOMMU to manage the DMA mappings.  It can cost MUCH more to set up and  tear down the IOMMU mappings with each request than perform the I/O!  For those specific cases, USB has primitives to allocate less expensive  memory.  They work like kmalloc and kfree versions that give you the right  kind of addresses to store in urb->transfer_buffer and urb->transfer_dma.  You'd also set URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP in urb->transfer_flags:	void *usb_buffer_alloc (struct usb_device *dev, size_t size,		int mem_flags, dma_addr_t *dma);	void usb_buffer_free (struct usb_device *dev, size_t size,		void *addr, dma_addr_t dma);  Most drivers should *NOT* be using these primitives; they don't need  to use this type of memory ("dma-coherent"), and memory returned from  kmalloc() will work just fine.  For control transfers you can use the buffer primitives or not for each  of the transfer buffer and setup buffer independently.  Set the flag bits  URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP and URB_NO_SETUP_DMA_MAP to indicate which  buffers you have prepared.  For non-control transfers URB_NO_SETUP_DMA_MAP  is ignored.  The memory buffer returned is "dma-coherent"; sometimes you might need to  force a consistent memory access ordering by using memory barriers.  It's  not using a streaming DMA mapping, so it's good for small transfers on  systems where the I/O would otherwise thrash an IOMMU mapping.  (See  Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt for definitions of "coherent" and "streaming"  DMA mappings.)  Asking for 1/Nth of a page (as well as asking for N pages) is reasonably  space-efficient.  On most systems the memory returned will be uncached, because the  semantics of dma-coherent memory require either bypassing CPU caches  or using cache hardware with bus-snooping support.  While x86 hardware  has such bus-snooping, many other systems use software to flush cache  lines to prevent DMA conflicts.- Devices on some EHCI controllers could handle DMA to/from high memory.  Unfortunately, the current Linux DMA infrastructure doesn't have a sane  way to expose these capabilities ... and in any case, HIGHMEM is mostly a  design wart specific to x86_32.  So your best bet is to ensure you never  pass a highmem buffer into a USB driver.  That's easy; it's the default  behavior.  Just don't override it; e.g. with NETIF_F_HIGHDMA.  This may force your callers to do some bounce buffering, copying from  high memory to "normal" DMA memory.  If you can come up with a good way  to fix this issue (for x86_32 machines with over 1 GByte of memory),  feel free to submit patches.WORKING WITH EXISTING BUFFERSExisting buffers aren't usable for DMA without first being mapped into theDMA address space of the device.  However, most buffers passed to yourdriver can safely be used with such DMA mapping.  (See the first sectionof DMA-mapping.txt, titled "What memory is DMA-able?")- When you're using scatterlists, you can map everything at once.  On some  systems, this kicks in an IOMMU and turns the scatterlists into single  DMA transactions:	int usb_buffer_map_sg (struct usb_device *dev, unsigned pipe,		struct scatterlist *sg, int nents);	void usb_buffer_dmasync_sg (struct usb_device *dev, unsigned pipe,		struct scatterlist *sg, int n_hw_ents);	void usb_buffer_unmap_sg (struct usb_device *dev, unsigned pipe,		struct scatterlist *sg, int n_hw_ents);  It's probably easier to use the new usb_sg_*() calls, which do the DMA  mapping and apply other tweaks to make scatterlist i/o be fast.- Some drivers may prefer to work with the model that they're mapping large  buffers, synchronizing their safe re-use.  (If there's no re-use, then let  usbcore do the map/unmap.)  Large periodic transfers make good examples  here, since it's cheaper to just synchronize the buffer than to unmap it  each time an urb completes and then re-map it on during resubmission.  These calls all work with initialized urbs:  urb->dev, urb->pipe,  urb->transfer_buffer, and urb->transfer_buffer_length must all be  valid when these calls are used (urb->setup_packet must be valid too  if urb is a control request):	struct urb *usb_buffer_map (struct urb *urb);	void usb_buffer_dmasync (struct urb *urb);	void usb_buffer_unmap (struct urb *urb);  The calls manage urb->transfer_dma for you, and set URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP  so that usbcore won't map or unmap the buffer.  The same goes for  urb->setup_dma and URB_NO_SETUP_DMA_MAP for control requests.Note that several of those interfaces are currently commented out, sincethey don't have current users.  See the source code.  Other than the dmasynccalls (where the underlying DMA primitives have changed), most of them caneasily be commented back in if you want to use them.