Re: [RFC] Export alignment requirements for buffers

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Hi Hans,

On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 01:02:26PM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
> On 06/01/2015 12:44 PM, Sakari Ailus wrote:
> > Hi Hans,
> > 
> > Thanks for the RFC.
> > 
> > On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 11:44:51AM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
> >> One of the things that is really irritating is the fact that drivers that
> >> use contig-dma sometimes want to support USERPTR, allowing applications to
> >> pass pointers to the driver that point to physically contiguous memory that
> >> was somehow obtained, and that userspace has no way of knowing whether the
> >> driver has this requirement or not.
> >>
> >> A related issue is that, depending on the DMA engine, the user pointer might
> >> have some alignment requirements (page aligned, or at minimum 16 bytes aligned)
> >> that userspace has no way of knowing.
> >>
> >> The same alignment issue is present also for dma-buf.
> >>
> >> I propose to take one reserved field from struct v4l2_create_buffers and
> >> from struct v4l2_requestbuffers and change it to this:
> >>
> >> 	__u32 flags;
> >>
> >> #define V4L2_REQBUFS_FL_ALIGNMENT_MSK	0x3f
> > 
> > How about V4L2_REQBUFS_FL_ALIGN_MASK instead? It's shorter, and that msk
> > part looks odd to me.
> 
> Hmm, how to do this. Currently it masks out 6 bits which form the power-of-two
> that determines the alignment. How about this:
> 
> #define V4L2_REQBUFS_FL_ALIGN_EXP(flags) ((flags) & 0x3f)
> #define V4L2_REQBUFS_FL_ALIGN_MASK(flags) ((1ULL << (flags & 0x3f)) - 1)
> 
> That gives you both mask and the exponent. Better names are welcome :-)
> ALIGN_PWR? PWR2? ALIGN_AT_BIT?

I think ALIGN_EXP and ALIGN_MASK are good.

> 
> > 
> >> #define V4L2_REQBUFS_FL_PHYS_CONTIG	(1 << 31)
> >>
> >> Where the alignment is a power of 2 (and if 0 the alignment is unknown). The max
> >> is 2^63, which should be enough for the foreseeable future :-)
> >>
> >> If the physically contiguous flag is set, then the buffer must be physically
> >> contiguous.
> > 
> > Both only apply to userptr buffers. I guess saying this in documentation
> > only is enough.
> 
> I don't follow you. Perhaps there is some confusion here? The flags field is set
> by the driver, not by userspace. So PHYS_CONTIG applies to any type of buffer if
> the driver uses dma-contig. And the alignment is valid for all drivers as well.

What I meant was that this is mostly relevant for userptr buffers, mmap
buffers are allocated by the driver as well as dma-buf buffers are, so the
user has no (or little?) use for this information on those buffer types.

> 
> > 
> > The approach looks good to me.
> > 
> >> dma-contig: the PHYS_CONTIG flag is always set and the alignment is (unless overridden
> >> by the driver) page aligned.
> >>
> >> dma-sg: the PHYS_CONTIG flag is 0 and the alignment will depend on the driver DMA
> >> implementation. Note: malloc will align the buffer to 8 bytes on a 32 bit OS and 16 bytes
> >> on a 64 bit OS.
> >>
> >> vmalloc: PHYS_CONFIG is 0 and the alignment should be 3 (2^3 == 8) for 32 bit and
> >> 4 (2^4=16) for 64 bit OS. This matches malloc() which will align the buffer to
> >> 8 bytes on a 32 bit OS and 16 bytes on a 64 bit OS.
> > 
> > Ack. Many dma-sg drivers actually can handle physically contiguous memory
> > since they're behind an IOMMU; the drivers can then set the flag if needed.
> 
> All dma-sg drivers can handle phys contig memory since that's just one DMA descriptor.
> 
> The flag is meant to say that the buffer *has* to be phys contig, not that it might
> be. So dma-sg drivers will not set it, since they don't have that requirement.

I meant to say drivers using dma-contig, not dma-sg.

-- 
regards,

Sakari Ailus
e-mail: sakari.ailus@xxxxxx	XMPP: sailus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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