Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2024 17:47:18 +0800
From: Howard Yen <howardyen@...gle.com>
To: Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@....com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>, m.szyprowski@...sung.com, gregkh@...uxfoundation.org, 
	andriy.shevchenko@...ux.intel.com, rafael@...nel.org, broonie@...nel.org, 
	james@...iv.tech, james.clark@....com, masahiroy@...nel.org, 
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, iommu@...ts.linux.dev
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] dma-coherent: add support for multi coherent rmems per dev

On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 10:31 PM Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@....com> wrote:
>
> On 27/02/2024 1:39 pm, Howard Yen wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 2:37 PM Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 05:27:58PM +0800, Howard Yen wrote:
> >>> The reason why I tried to propose this patch is that in the system I'm
> >>> working on, where the driver utilizes the coherent reserved memory in
> >>> the subsystem for DMA, which has limited memory space as its primary
> >>> usage. During the execution of the driver, there is a possibility of
> >>> encountering memory depletion scenarios with the primary one.
> >>>
> >>> To address this issue, I tried to create a patch that enables the
> >>> coherent reserved memory driver to support multiple coherent reserved
> >>> memory regions per device. This modification aims to provide the
> >>> driver with the ability to search for memory from a secondary region
> >>> if the primary memory is exhausted, and so on.
> >>
> >> This all seems pretty vague.  Can you point to your driver submission
> >> and explain why it can't just use a larger region instead of multiple
> >> smaller ones?
> >>
> >
> > The reason why it needs multiple regions is that in my system there is
> > an always-on subsystem which includes a small size memory, and several
> > functions need to run and occupy the memory from the small memory if
> > they need to run on the always-on subsystem. These functions must
> > allocate the memory from the small memory region, so that they can get
> > benefit from the always-on subsystem. So the small memory is split for
> > multiple functions which are satisfied with their generic use cases.
>
> I don't really see how that aligns with what you've implemented, though.
> The coherent allocator doesn't have any notion of the caller's use-case,
> it's just going to allocate from wherever it happens to find space
> first. Thus even the calls which would somehow benefit from allocating
> from the "primary" region will have no way to guarantee that they will
> actually allocate from there if it's already been consumed by callers
> who didn't need that benefit but just happened to get there first.
>
> Really that sounds like a case for having specific named memory-regions
> and managing them directly from the relevant driver, rather than trying
> to convince the generic dma-coherent abstraction to do things that don't
> really fit it. Otherwise I'd be slightly concerned that you're expecting
> to bake secret undocumented ABI into DMA API implementations where some
> particular order of allocations must guarantee a particular
> deterministic behaviour, which is really not something we want.

Thanks for the response.

The original problem I tried to resolve is the use-case explained in
the previous reply, and I was thinking of implementing it in a generic
way. Then I tried to submit this patch. As you mentioned here, it
provides the benefit that if somehow the "primary" region has no way
to guarantee for the callers. And my use-case is one of its uses.


---
Best Regards,

Howard

>
> Thanks,
> Robin.
>
> > But in specific use cases, they required more memory than their
> > pre-allocated memory region, so I tried to propose this patch to give
> > it the ability to get the memory from another larger memory to solve
> > the issue.
> >
> > I'll upload the next version to show the modification in the driver.
> >
> > ---
> > Best Regards,
> >
> > Howard



-- 
Best Regards,

Howard

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