On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 09:05:26AM +0100, Christoph Lameter wrote: > On Tue, 7 Dec 2021, Baoquan He wrote: > > > into ZONE_DMA32 by default. The zone DMA covering low 16M is used to > > take care of antique ISA devices. In fact, on 64bit system, it rarely > > need ZONE_DMA (which is low 16M) to support almost extinct ISA devices. > > However, some components treat DMA as a generic concept, e.g > > kmalloc-dma, slab allocator initializes it for later any DMA related > > buffer allocation, but not limited to ISA DMA. > > The idea of the slab allocator DMA support is to have memory available > for devices that can only support a limited range of physical addresses. > These are only to be enabled for platforms that have such requirements. > > The slab allocators guarantee that all kmalloc allocations are DMA able > indepent of specifying ZONE_DMA/ZONE_DMA32 Yes. And we never supported slab for ZONE_DMA32 and should work on getting rid of it for ZONE_DMA as well. The only thing that guarantees device addressability is the DMA API. The DMA API needs ZONE_DMA/DMA32 to back its page allocations, but supporting this in slab is a bad idea only explained by historic reasons from before when we had a DMA API. > > On arm64, even though both CONFIG_ZONE_DMA and CONFIG_ZONE_DMA32 > > are enabled, it makes ZONE_DMA covers the low 4G area, and ZONE_DMA32 > > empty. Unless on specific platforms (e.g. 30-bit on Raspberry Pi 4), > > then zone DMA covers the 1st 1G area, zone DMA32 covers the rest of > > the 32-bit addressable memory. > > ZONE_NORMAL should cover all memory. ARM does not need ZONE_DMA32. arm32 not, arm64 does. And the Pi 4 is an arm64 device. > > I am wondering if we can also change the size of DMA and DMA32 ZONE as > > dynamically adjusted, just as arm64 is doing? On x86_64, we can make > > zone DMA covers the 32-bit addressable memory, and empty zone DMA32 by > > default. Once ISA_DMA_API is enabled, we go back to make zone DMA covers > > low 16M area, zone DMA32 covers the rest of 32-bit addressable memory. > > (I am not familiar with ISA_DMA_API, will it require 24-bit addressable > > memory when enabled?) > > The size of ZONE_DMA is traditionally depending on the platform. On some > it is 16MB, on some 1G and on some 4GB. ZONE32 is always 4GB and should > only be used if ZONE_DMA has already been used. ZONE32 should be (and generally is) used whenever there is zone covering the 32-bit CPU physical address limit. > > ZONE_DMA is dynamic in the sense of being different on different > platforms. Agreed.
