Re: [PATCH 1/4] of/fdt: Update zone_dma_bits when running in bcm2711

[Catalin Marinas]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2020 at 06:23:06PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Oct 2020 at 17:24, Lorenzo Pieralisi
> <lorenzo.pieralisi@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > We can move this check to IORT code and call it from arm64 if it
> > can be made to work.
> 
> Finding the smallest value in the IORT, and assigning it to
> zone_dma_bits if it is < 32 should be easy. But as I understand it,
> having these separate DMA and DMA32 zones is what breaks kdump, no? So
> how is this going to fix the underlying issue?

If zone_dma_bits is 32, ZONE_DMA32 disappears into ZONE_DMA (GFP_DMA32
allocations fall back to ZONE_DMA).

kdump wants DMA-able memory and, without a 30-bit ZONE_DMA, that would
be the bottom 32-bit. With the introduction of ZONE_DMA, this suddenly
became 1GB. We could change kdump to allocate ZONE_DMA32 but this one
may also be small as it lost 1GB to ZONE_DMA. However, the kdump kernel
would need to be rebuilt without ZONE_DMA since it won't have any. IIRC
(it's been a while since I looked), the kdump allocation couldn't span
multiple zones.

In a separate thread, we try to fix kdump to use allocations above 4G as
a fallback but this only fixes platforms with enough RAM (and maybe it's
only those platforms that care about kdump).

-- 
Catalin