On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 09:50:20AM -0800, Greg KH wrote: > On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 11:56:42AM -0500, Jason Cooper wrote: > > Greg, > > > > I've added you to the this thread hoping for a little insight into USB > > drivers and their use of coherent and GFP_ATOMIC. Am I barking up the > > wrong tree by looking a the drivers? > > I don't understand, which drivers are you referring to? USB host > controller drivers, or the "normal" drivers? Sorry I wasn't clear, I was referring specifically to the usb dvb drivers em28xx, drxk and dib0700. These are the drivers reported to be in heavy use when the error occurs. sata_mv is also in use, however no other users of sata_mv have reported problems. Including myself. ;-) > Most USB drivers use GFP_ATOMIC if they are creating memory during > their URB callback path, as that is interrupt context. But it > shouldn't be all that bad, and the USB core hasn't changed in a while, > so something else must be causing this. Agreed, so I went and did more reading. The key piece of the puzzle that I was missing was in arch/arm/mm/dma-mapping.c 660-684. /* * Allocate DMA-coherent memory space and return both the kernel * remapped * virtual and bus address for that space. */ void *arm_dma_alloc(struct device *dev, size_t size, dma_addr_t *handle, gfp_t gfp, struct dma_attrs *attrs) { pgprot_t prot = __get_dma_pgprot(attrs, pgprot_kernel); void *memory; if (dma_alloc_from_coherent(dev, size, handle, &memory)) return memory; return __dma_alloc(dev, size, handle, gfp, prot, false, __builtin_return_address(0)); } static void *arm_coherent_dma_alloc(struct device *dev, size_t size, dma_addr_t *handle, gfp_t gfp, struct dma_attrs *attrs) { pgprot_t prot = __get_dma_pgprot(attrs, pgprot_kernel); void *memory; if (dma_alloc_from_coherent(dev, size, handle, &memory)) return memory; return __dma_alloc(dev, size, handle, gfp, prot, true, __builtin_return_address(0)); } My understanding of this code is that when a driver requests dma memory, we will first try to alloc from the per-driver pool. If that fails, we will then attempt to allocate from the atomic_pool. Once the atomic_pool is exhausted, we get the error: ERROR: 1024 KiB atomic DMA coherent pool is too small! Please increase it with coherent_pool= kernel parameter! If my understanding is correct, one of the drivers (most likely one) either asks for too small of a dma buffer, or is not properly deallocating blocks from the per-device pool. Either case leads to exhaustion, and falling back to the atomic pool. Which subsequently gets wiped out as well. Am I on the right track? thx, Jason. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>