Re: [PATCH 6/8] drm: Add a drm_get_unmapped_area() helper

From: Christian KÃnig
Date: Wed Dec 04 2019 - 09:41:00 EST


Am 04.12.19 um 13:32 schrieb Thomas HellstrÃm (VMware):
On 12/4/19 1:08 PM, Christian KÃnig wrote:
Am 04.12.19 um 12:36 schrieb Thomas HellstrÃm (VMware):
On 12/4/19 12:11 PM, Christian KÃnig wrote:
Am 03.12.19 um 14:22 schrieb Thomas HellstrÃm (VMware):
From: Thomas Hellstrom <thellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx>

This helper is used to align user-space buffer object addresses to
huge page boundaries, minimizing the chance of alignment mismatch
between user-space addresses and physical addresses.

Mhm, I'm wondering if that is really such a good idea.

Could you elaborate? What drawbacks do you see?

Main problem for me seems to be that I don't fully understand what the get_unmapped_area callback is doing.

It makes sure that, if there is a chance that we could use huge page-table entries, virtual address huge page boundaries are perfectly aligned to physical address huge page boundaries, which is if not a CPU hardware requirement, at least a kernel requirement currently.



For example why do we need to use drm_vma_offset_lookup_locked() to adjust the pgoff?

The mapped offset should be completely irrelevant for finding some piece of userspace address space or am I totally off here?


Because the unmodified pgoff assumes that physical address boundaries are perfectly aligned with file offset boundaries, which is typical for all other subsystems.

That's not true for TTM, however, where a buffer object start physical address may be huge page aligned, but the file offset is always page aligned. We could of course change that to align also file offsets to huge page size boundaries, but with the above adjustment, that's not needed. I opted for the adjustment.

I would opt for aligning the file offsets instead.

Now that you explained it that the rest of the kernel enforces this actually makes sense.

Regards,
Christian.


Thanks,

Thomas