On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm not excited about the whole "alternate aligment". > > Maybe the kernel should just accept the smaller alignment. If the > minimum alignment we use is bigger than necessary, then we're just > wrong about it, and perhaps we should just use the smaller alignment > that the bios used. Look like I did not make it clearly in this change log. Current kernel code sizing is searching smallest alignment, so call it min_align scheme. Some bios is using different way: It use smallest size instead, but it could have bigger alignment than min_align, so I call it alt_size scheme. PROs for min_align: it can be used to calculate upper parent bridges easily and safely. CONs for min_align: it could generate more bigger required size. PROs for alt_size: it try to search smaller size, esp for under 4G mmio space. CONs for alt_size: it could have much bigger alignment, and need to calculate the upper bridge alt_size carefully. We end it up with try out to search the upper bridge alt_size. Current min_align code still have other problem: it can not handle block that size is bigger than alignment, and it would generate wrong/too big align/size. In the patch set, We 1. fix the min_align scheme to use try out way to find right min_align even block size if bigger than block alignment. 2. add alt_size scheme, it will search alt_size/alt_align, that have smaller size a. compare that with min_align/min_size, if alt_size is not smaller than min_size just dump alt_size. otherwise record alt_size. b. later if we fail to get allocation with min_align, we retry alt_size. So we still keep the old way as usual, and only handle some extra corner case like 1. BIOS use small size and big align allocation, and in kernel we are doing pci device remove or rescan. 2. We have couple layers of bridges that min_align scheme is wasting space. and we have tight mmio under 4G. Please let me know if I describe it clearly this time, otherwise I would extract sample output from patches and post here. Thanks Yinghai -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-pci" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html