On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 5:08 AM, Tomi Valkeinen <tomi.valkeinen@xxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > OMAP has a custom video ram allocator, which I'd like to remove and use > the standard dma allocation functions. > > There are two problems for which I'd like to hear suggestions or > comments: > > First one is that the dma_alloc_* functions map the allocated memory for > cpu use. In many cases with OMAP DSS (display subsystem) this is not > needed: the memory may be written only by the SGX or the DSP, and it's > only read by the DSS, so it's never touched by the CPU. see dma_alloc_attrs() and DMA_ATTR_NO_KERNEL_MAPPING > This is even more true when using VRFB on omap3 (and probably TILER on > omap4) for rotation, as VRFB hides the actual memory and offers rotated > views. In this case the backend memory is never accessed by anyone else > than VRFB. just fwiw, we don't actually need contiguous memory on o4/tiler :-) (well, at least if you ignore things like secure playback) > Is there a way to allocate the memory without creating a mapping? While > it won't break anything as such, the allocated areas can be quite large > thus causing large areas of the kernel's memory space to be needlessly > reserved. > > The second case is passing a framebuffer address from the bootloader to > the kernel. Often with mobile devices the bootloader will initialize the > display hardware, showing a company logo or such. To keep the image on > the screen when kernel starts we need to reserve the same physical > memory area early at boot, and use that for the framebuffer. with a bit of handwaving, this is possible. You can pass a base address to dma_declare_contiguous() when you setup your device's CMA pool. Although that doesn't really guarantee you're allocation from that pool is at offset zero, I suppose. > I'm not sure if there's any actual problem with this one, presuming > there is a solution for the first case. Somehow the memory is reserved > at early boot time, and this is passed to the fb driver. But can the > memory be managed the same way as in normal case (for example freeing > it), or does it need to be handled as a special case? special-casing it might be better.. although possibly a dma attr could be added for this to tell dma_alloc_from_contiguous() that we need a particular address within the CMA pool. It seems a bit like a hack, but OTOH I guess pretty much every consumer device would need a hack like this. BR, -R > Tomi > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
