I'm actually working on exactly the same thing right now and I'm going the ioctl() route. The general idea is for user space to allocate the buffer which will be used for the DMA transfer and an ioctl() will be used to pass the size and address of this buffer to the device driver. The driver will then use scatter-gather lists along with the streaming DMA API to transfer data directly to and from the device and user-space buffer.
You basically have the right idea: in 2.1, you can just have userspace allocate any old memory. You do want it page-aligned, so posix_memalign() is a handy API to use.
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