"This patch corrects what I hope are invalid assumptions about the DMA engine layer: Not only Intel(R) hardware can do DMA, and DMA can be used for other things than memcpy and RAID offloading," Haavard Skinnemoen noted, submitted a small patch against the DMADEVICES Kconfig option. He added, "Don't get me wrong; I think Intel deserves lots of respect for creating this framework. But this is also why I got a bit disappointed when I discovered that it seems to be less generic than I initially hoped." Haavard continued:

"DMA controllers, which may support plain memcpy acceleration in addition to more traditional 'slave DMA', are very common in SoC devices, and I think Linux needs a common framework for it. The existing DMA Engine framework seems to come pretty close already, but I think it needs more input from the embedded crowd before it can be completely usable on a large number of embedded systems."