Streaming DMA mapping question

[Adam Kropelin <akropel1@rochester.rr.com>]

I'm working on revamping the DMA mapping of a driver and have been reading
Documentation/DMA-Mapping.txt and becoming one with it. On i386 I notice the
following discrepency:

According to the docs, you should either unmap or sync your DMA buffer before
touching it from the host. The i386 implementation of pci_unmap is empty --no
problem; there must not be any unmap work to do on this arch. But the 
implementation of pci_dma_sync does contain a flush_write_buffers() call. This
makes me think that perhaps if I'm going to modify the buffer before I submit it
back to the controller I need to do:

/* so I can read it; not necessary on i386 */
pci_dma_sync_single(...);

fiddle_with_buffer(...);

/* so adapter sees my changes; this is necessary on i386 */
pci_dma_sync_single(...);

Otherwise I don't see why it is safe to touch the buffer after pci_unmap.

Someone lend me a clue?

--Adam