Re: [PATCH 05/14] lib: Add I/O map cache implementation

[Thierry Reding]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 09:28:47PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 09:43:05PM +0100, Thierry Reding wrote:
> > The I/O map cache is used to map large regions of physical memory in
> > smaller chunks to avoid running out of vmalloc()/ioremap() space.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Thierry Reding <thierry.reding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> We already have a means where we record the mappings which ioremap()
> creates.  If you look at /proc/vmallocinfo, you'll notice lines such
> as:
> 
> 0xf7b72000-0xf7b74000    8192 e1000_probe+0x291/0xa68 [e1000e] phys=fc025000 ioremap
> 
> which gives you the virtual address range, physical address and type
> of the mapping.  Why do we need a duplicated data structure?
> 
> Moreover, you seem to suggest that you want to break up a large
> ioremap() mapping into several smaller mappings.  Why?  The idea
> behind ioremap() is that this relationship holds true:
> 
> 	ptr = ioremap(cookie + n, size);
> 
> For any 'n' in the range 0 .. size, the location shall be accessible
> via ptr + n when using the IO space accessors.  If you're going to
> break up a mapping into several smaller ones, this no longer holds
> true.
> 
> If the problem is that you're ioremapping huge address ranges because
> you're passing larger-than-required resources to devices, then that's
> part of the problem too.

The resource is not larger than required. It's just that in order to
address the extended configuration space of all PCI devices we require a
full 256 MiB window.

What this patch tries to achieve is allow a driver to take a large
region and ioremap() it page by page on an as needed basis.

Thierry

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