Hello, On Saturday, July 09, 2011 4:57 PM Janusz Krzysztofik wrote: > On Wed, 6 Jul 2011 at 16:59:45 Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > On Wednesday 06 July 2011, Nicolas Pitre wrote: > > > On Wed, 6 Jul 2011, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote: > > > > Another issue is that when a platform has restricted DMA regions, > > > > they typically don't fall into the highmem zone. As the > > > > dmabounce code allocates from the DMA coherent allocator to > > > > provide it with guaranteed DMA-able memory, that would be rather > > > > inconvenient. > > > > > > Do we encounter this in practice i.e. do those platforms requiring > > > large contiguous allocations motivating this work have such DMA > > > restrictions? > > > > You can probably find one or two of those, but we don't have to > > optimize for that case. I would at least expect the maximum size of > > the allocation to be smaller than the DMA limit for these, and > > consequently mandate that they define a sufficiently large > > CONSISTENT_DMA_SIZE for the crazy devices, or possibly add a hack to > > unmap some low memory and call > > dma_declare_coherent_memory() for the device. > > Once found that Russell has dropped his "ARM: DMA: steal memory for DMA > coherent mappings" for now, let me get back to this idea of a hack that > would allow for safely calling dma_declare_coherent_memory() in order to > assign a device with a block of contiguous memory for exclusive use. We tested such approach and finally with 3.0-rc1 it works fine. You can find an example for dma_declare_coherent() together with required memblock_remove() calls in the following patch series: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-samsung-soc/msg05026.html "[PATCH 0/3 v2] ARM: S5P: Add support for MFC device on S5PV210 and EXYNOS4" > Assuming there should be no problem with successfully allocating a large > continuous block of coherent memory at boot time with > dma_alloc_coherent(), this block could be reserved for the device. The > only problem is with the dma_declare_coherent_memory() calling > ioremap(), which was designed with a device's dedicated physical memory > in mind, but shouldn't be called on a memory already mapped. All these issues with ioremap has been finally resolved in 3.0-rc1. Like Russell pointed me in http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg127644.html, ioremap can be fixed to work on early reserved memory areas by selecting ARCH_HAS_HOLES_MEMORYMODEL Kconfig option. > There were three approaches proposed, two of them in August 2010: > http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-media/msg22179.html, > http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg96318.html, > and a third one in January 2011: > http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-arch/msg12637.html. > > As far as I can understand the reason why both of the first two were > NAKed, it was suggested that videobuf-dma-contig shouldn't use coherent > if all it requires is a contiguous memory, and a new API should be > invented, or dma_pool API extended, for providing contiguous memory. This is another story. DMA-mapping framework definitely needs some extensions to allow more detailed specification of the allocated memory (currently we have only coherent and nearly ARM-specific writecombine). During Linaro Memory Management summit we agreed that the dma_alloc_attrs() function might be needed to clean-up the API and provide a nice way of adding new memory parameters. Having a possibility to allocate contiguous cached buffers might be one of the new DMA attributes. Here are some details of my proposal: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg21235.html > The > CMA was pointed out as a new work in progress contiguous memory API. That was probably the biggest mistake at the beginning. We definitely should have learned dma-mapping framework and its internals. > Now > it turns out it's not, it's only a helper to ensure that > dma_alloc_coherent() always succeeds, and videobuf2-dma-contig is still > going to allocate buffers from coherent memory. I hope that once the dma_alloc_attrs() API will be accepted, I will add support for memory attributes to videobuf2-dma-contig allocator. > (CCing both authors, Marin Mitov and Guennadi Liakhovetski, and their > main opponent, FUJITA Tomonori) > > The third solution was not discussed much after it was pointed out as > being not very different from those two in terms of the above mentioned > rationale. > > All three solutions was different from now suggested method of unmapping > some low memory and then calling dma_declare_coherent_memory() which > ioremaps it in that those tried to reserve some boot time allocated > coherent memory, already mapped correctly, without (io)remapping it. > > If there are still problems with the CMA on one hand, and a need for a > hack to handle "crazy devices" is still seen, regardless of CMA > available and working or not, on the other, maybe we should get back to > the idea of adopting coherent API to new requirements, review those > three proposals again and select one which seems most acceptable to > everyone? Being a submitter of the third, I'll be happy to refresh it if > selected. I'm open to discussion. 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
