Re: opinions about non-page-aligned buffers?

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On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 5:32 PM, Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Friday, December 24, 2010 22:29:37 Rob Clark wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The request has come up on OMAP4 to support non-page-aligned v4l2
>> buffers.  (This is in context of v4l2 display, but the same reasons
>> would apply for a camera.)  For most common resolutions, this would
>> help us get much better memory utilization for a range of memory (or
>> rather address space) used for YUV buffers.
>
> Can you explain this in more detail? I don't really see how non-page
> aligned buffers would lead to 'much better' memory usage. I would expect
> that the best savings you could achieve would be PAGE_SIZE-1 per buffer.
>

Due to how the buffers are mapped, the savings is actually quite
substantial.  What actually happens is the region of memory that the
buffers are allocated from has a stride of 16kb or 32kb.  (For NV12, Y
has a 16kb stride, and UV is  disjoint is a 32kb stride.)  To keep
things somewhat sane for userspace, the Y followed by UV gets mmap'd
into consecutive 4kb pages.  So we are actually loosing 1.5 * (4kb -
width) per buffer by forcing page alignment.  With non page-aligned
buffers we can pack buffers next to each other, ie. so one buffer may
exist within the stride of another buffer.


BR,
-R


> Regards,
>
>        Hans
>
>> However it would require
>> a small change in the client application, since most (all) v4l2 apps
>> that I have seen are assuming the offsets they are given to mmap are
>> page aligned.
>>
>> I am curious if anyone has any suggestions about how to enable this.
>> Ideally it would be some sort of opt-in feature to avoid breaking apps
>> that are not aware the the offsets to mmap may not be page aligned.
>>
>> BR,
>> -R
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>
> --
> Hans Verkuil - video4linux developer - sponsored by Cisco
>
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