Re: [PATCH v4 07/10] dma-buf: heaps: Add support for Tegra VPR

[Vincent Donnefort]

[...]

> > > Interesting. I had been thinking more along the lines of adding this
> > > directly into memblock using a new entry in enum memblock_flags. None of
> > > the existing ones seem to do what we need here, though some are closely
> > > related. MEMBLOCK_SECURE or MEMBLOCK_PROTECTED are quite specific and
> > > don't necessarily mean that we need the mapping to be page-granular, so
> > > MEMBLOCK_PAGE_GRANULAR is perhaps clearer.
> > 
> > I thought it would be interesting to not have to modify memblock since it is
> > used for all architectures, while the DT is at least slightly less widespread.
> 
> This isn't something that is DT specific. On the Tegra side, I suspect
> we might need this on ACPI platforms eventually, too. And it's not an
> ARM specific feature either. Other platforms could use shared carveouts,
> too.

Agreed, and actually I have tried the memblock version and it looks quite neat!

I will share what I have after the merge-window.

> 
> > Also, cma_init_reserved_mem() could use an order 9. In that case PTE-level isn't
> > necessary and we could just use PMD-level. Extending that support would be more
> > cumbersome with a memblock flag than with a callback.
> > 
> > rmem_cma_setup() hardcoding an order 0, perhaps this isn't really a problem at
> > the moment?
> 
> How so? memblock is really just used as a way of backing the CMA. How
> CMA subdivides it doesn't really matter, right?
> 
> Or are you suggesting that if we use an entire PMD as granularity, we
> could equally well remove the entire PMD from the linear mapping instead
> of doing it page-by-page? I think that'd work really well for at least
> VPR, since it is 1 MiB aligned anyway. Using a granularity of 2 MiB is
> easily doable.

Yes, that is what I meant. We could easily force a PMD-level mapping instead of
PTE-level one. But then that means declaring another memblock flag. 

> 
> For anything that doesn't require a single contiguous area to be
> protected this might be a bit more challenging since it potentially
> wastes a lot of memory. On the other hand, a lot of this is heavily
> custom code anyway, so the entire stack could be modified to make
> efficient use of this (i.e. userspace could allocate a larger chunk
> for a pool of buffers, etc.).
> 
> > But yeah, the alternative is to create a "memblock_mark_forcepte" (it seems
> > memblock_setclr_flag does split memblocks) and let of_reserved_mem call that
> > function. Finally the arm64 mmu code can simply check for the flag before
> > calling __map_memblock. Perhaps it isn't that bad in the end?
> 
> It sounds like the right level of abstraction to me. But I'm not too
> familiar with this code, so it'd be good to hear from the MM and/or ARM
> maintainers what they think about this.
> 
> [...]
> > I had in mind to extend "shared-dma-pool" to handle
> > set_direct_map_invalid_noflush()/set_direct_map_default_noflush() based on an
> > option. But perhaps it is better to create another separate driver. And VPR
> > needing a specific dma-heap driver anyway, it could call the direct-map
> > functions there too without relying on CMA to do anything?
> 
> I think it'd be nice to have separate APIs for this case where we know
> the memory region is already page-granular (or, I suppose, PMD granular)
> and removing from (or adding back to) the linear mapping is safe. That
> way we could avoid the checks for can_set_direct_map() for each page.
> 
> It'd also be nice to have a version that can update the protection bits
> for a range of pages (would map directly to update_range_prot()) instead
> of having to manually iterate over each page in a range.
>

How about?

  /* True if can_set_direct_map() or [start, end) is mapped at PTE-level */
  can_set_direct_map_range(phys_addr_t start, phys_addr_t end); 

  /* Must check can_set_direct_map() or can_set_direct_map_range() first */
  __set_direct_map_invalid_noflush(phys_addr_t start, phys_addr_t end)
  __set_direct_map_default_noflush(phys_addr_t start, phys_addr_t end)

> A good middle-ground might be to have helpers that do the grunt work and
> they can then be called from VPR and the shared-dma-pool drivers to have
> pages removed from the linear mapping. VPR and similar can then perform
> the hardware protection bits on top of that.

I believe between the reserved-memory attribute to force the last-level mappings
and the direct map functions above, there's enough for the VPR driver?

-- 
Vincent

> 
> Thierry