Re: [RFC PATCH 7/8] mm/ioremap: Consider IOREMAP space in generic ioremap

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2022, at 9:54 AM, Alexander Gordeev wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 12:39:11PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> "Some" means exactly powerpc64, right? It looks like microblaze
>> and powerpc32 still share some of this code, but effectively
>> just use the vmalloc area once the slab allocator is up.
>> 
>> Is the special case still useful for powerpc64 or could this be
>> changed to do it the same as everything else?
>
> Or make it the other way around and set IOREMAP_START/IOREMAP_END
> to VMALLOC_START/VMALLOC_END by default?

Sure, if there is a reason for actually making them different.
>From the git history, it appears that before commit 3d5134ee8341
("[POWERPC] Rewrite IO allocation & mapping on powerpc64"), the
ioremap() and vmalloc() handling was largely duplicated. Ben
cleaned it up by making most of the implementation shared but left
the separate address spaces.

My guess is that there was no technical reason for this, other
than having no reason to change the behavior at the time.

       Arnd