Understanding DMA Transfers

AIX® DMA support deals with the issues of direct memory access by I/O devices to and from system memory.

The programming framework supports common I/O buses (such as PCI, industry standard architecture (ISA), and PCIe) and is easily extensible to additional bus types in the future. The framework supports 64-bit addressability, and also allows for mappings from 32-bit devices to 64-bit addresses to be hidden from the devices and their drivers.