Re: [RFC][PATCH 1/2] WIP: Devicetree bindings for Ion

From: Andrew
Date: Tue Oct 13 2015 - 04:22:52 EST


On 2015-10-12 21:39, Mitchel Humpherys wrote:
On Tue, Oct 06 2015 at 05:35:41 PM, Rob Herring <robherring2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Laura Abbott <labbott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

+Example:
+
+ ion {
+ compatbile = "linux,ion";
+ #address-cells = <1>;
+ #size-cells = <0>;
+
+ ion-system-heap {
+ linux,ion-heap-id = <0>;
+ linux,ion-heap-type = <ION_SYSTEM_HEAP_TYPE>;
+ linux,ion-heap-name = "system";

How does this vary across platforms? Is all of this being pushed down
to DT, because there is no coordination of this at the kernel ABI
level across platforms. In other words, why can't heap 0 be hardcoded
as system heap in the driver. It seems to me any 1 of these 3
properties could be used to derive the other 2.

The heap-id<->heap-type mapping isn't necessarily 1:1. As Laura
indicated elsewhere on this thread, a given heap might need to be
contiguous on one platform but not on another. In that case you just
swap out the heap-type here and there's no need for userspace to change.

The heap-name, OTOH, could be derived from the heap-id, which is what we
hackishly do here [1] and here[2].

By the way, since we agreed that heap id and heap type mappings
are not 1:1 - we have a problem with the current API.

In userspace we currently have this:

int ion_alloc(int fd, size_t len, size_t align, unsigned int heap_mask,
unsigned int flags, ion_user_handle_t *handle);

We do not specify here what TYPE of heap we want the allocation to come from.
This may lead to very unpleasant stuff when porting from one platfrom to another.

But, manual heap id control is VERY neat, since it allows to cover a lot of
platform-specific cases, where allocating memory from certain heaps can
yield performance boost.

In other words - maybe we should specify both suitable heap types and heap ids?

[1]
https://www.codeaurora.org/cgit/quic/la/kernel/msm-3.14/tree/drivers/staging/android/ion/msm/msm_ion.c?h=msm-3.14#n53
[2]
https://www.codeaurora.org/cgit/quic/la/kernel/msm-3.14/tree/drivers/staging/android/ion/msm/msm_ion.c?h=msm-3.14#n398


-Mitch

--
Regards,
Andrew
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