Can anyone advise, or give example of, communicating large (>128 byte) incoming buffers from a dext to a user-space app?
My specific situation is interrupt reads from a USB device. These return reports which are too large to fit into the asyncData field of an AsyncCompletion call. Apple's CommunicatingBetweenADriverKitExtensionAndAClientApp sample shows examples of returning a "large" struct, but the example is synchronous. The asynchronous example returns data by copying into a IOUserClientAsyncArgumentsArray, which isn't very big.
I can allocate a single buffer larger than 4K in user space, and communicate that buffer to my driver as an IOMemoryDescriptor when I set up my async callback. The driver retains the descriptor, maps it into its memory space and can thus write into it when the hardware returns interrupt data. The driver then calls AsyncCompletion, which will cause my user-side callback to be called, so the user side software knows that there's new data available in the previously allocated buffer.
That's fine, it works, but there are data race problems - since USB interrupt reads complete whenever the hardware has provided data, incoming completions happen at unpredictable times, so the shared buffer contents could change while the user side code is examining them.
Is there an example somewhere of how to deal with this? Can I allocate memory on the driver side on demand, create an IOMemoryDescriptor for it and return that descriptor packed inside the asyncData? If so, how does the driver know when it can relinquish that memory? I have a feeling there's something here I just don't understand...