Hello, On Tuesday, July 27, 2010 2:09 PM Russell King - ARM Linux wrote: > On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 04:40:30PM +0200, Michal Nazarewicz wrote: > > +** Why is it needed? > > + > > + Various devices on embedded systems have no scatter-getter and/or > > + IO map support and as such require contiguous blocks of memory to > > + operate. They include devices such as cameras, hardware video > > + decoders and encoders, etc. > > Yes, this is becoming quite a big problem - and many ARM SoCs suffer > from the existing memory allocators being extremely inadequate for > their use. > > One of the areas I've been working on is sorting out the DMA coherent > allocator so we don't violate the architecture requirements for ARMv6 > and ARMv7 CPUs (which basically prohibits multiple mappings of memory > with different attributes.) > > One of the ideas that I've thought about for this is to reserve an > amount of contiguous memory at boot time to fill the entire DMA coherent > mapping, marking the memory in the main kernel memory map as 'no access', > and allocate directly from the DMA coherent region. > > However, discussing this with people who have the problem you're trying > to solve indicates that they do not want to set aside an amount of > memory as they perceive this to be a waste of resources. Assuming your board have only 128MB of physical memory (quite common case for some embedded boards), leaving 16MB unused just for DMA coherent area is a huge waste imho. > This concern also applies to 'cma'. Yes, we know. We plan to recover some of that 'wasted' memory by providing a way to allocate some kind of virtual swap device on it. This is just an idea, no related works has been started yet. > > > +/* > > + * Don't call it directly, use cma_alloc(), cma_alloc_from() or > > + * cma_alloc_from_region(). > > + */ > > +dma_addr_t __must_check > > +__cma_alloc(const struct device *dev, const char *kind, > > + size_t size, dma_addr_t alignment); > > Does this really always return DMA-able memory (memory which can be > DMA'd to/from without DMA-mapping etc?) > > As it returns a dma_addr_t, it's returning a cookie for the memory which > will be suitable for writing directly to the device 'dev' doing the DMA. > (NB: DMA addresses may not be the same as physical addresses, especially > if the device is on a downstream bus. We have ARM platforms which have > different bus offsets.) > > How does one obtain the CPU address of this memory in order for the CPU > to access it? Right, we did not cover such case. In CMA approach we tried to separate memory allocation from the memory mapping into user/kernel space. Mapping a buffer is much more complicated process that cannot be handled in a generic way, so we decided to leave this for the device drivers. Usually video processing devices also don't need in-kernel mapping for such buffers at all. Best regards -- Marek Szyprowski Samsung Poland R&D Center -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
