Re: [PATCH 3/4] dt-binding: remoteproc: venus rproc dt binding document

[Stanimir Varbanov <stanimir.varbanov@linaro.org>]

Hi Bjorn,

On 09/02/2016 11:12 PM, Bjorn Andersson wrote:
> On Fri 02 Sep 04:52 PDT 2016, Marek Szyprowski wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> On 2016-09-01 16:58, Stanimir Varbanov wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Cc: Marek
>>>
>>
>> ...
>>
>>>>>> But I presume we have the implementation issue of dma_alloc_coherent()
>>>>>> failing in either case with the 5MB size. I think we need to look into
>>>>> I'd be good to include Marek Szyprowski? At least he will know what
>>>>> design restrictions there are.
>>>>>
>>>> Please do. The more I look at this the more I think we must use the
>>>> existing infrastructure for allocating "dma memory". Getting
>>>> dma_alloc_coherent() supporting non-power-of-2 memory regions would
>>> Just to be precise it should be dma_alloc_from_coherent().
>>>
>>> Marek, what is your opinion on that, can we make dma_alloc_from_coherent
>>> able to allocate memory for sizes with bigger granularity.
>>>
>>> For your convenience here [1] is the mail thread.
>>
>> There should be no technical restrictions to add support for bigger
>> granularity than power-of-2. dma_alloc_from_coherent uses standard
>> bitmap based allocator, so it already support tracking allocations of
>> arbitrary size.
> 
> I believe we should be able to change the parameter of
> bitmap_{find_free,release,allocate}_region() to take a size rather than
> an order.
> 
> The mask used in __reg_op() is an unsigned long, that is stamped over
> the region to be masked or cleared, so there are some clear restrictions
> in what parameters we can pass there - without having to break this
> operation up in steps.
> 
> But if drive the offset by taking the next power-of-two of the size and
> then align the number of bits to min(count, BITS_PER_LONG) we should
> retain the performance characteristics and requirements of __reg_op().
> 
>> However for the small allocations (smaller than 64KiB?, 512KiB?) it
>> would make sense to keep nearest-power-of-2 round up to prevent memory
>> fragmentation.
> 
> But in our case each bit matches a single page, so by making sure the
> mask always fills the unsigned long in the larger cases we would end up
> with having to align things to 128kb (or 256kb if unsigned long is 64
> bit).
> 
> 
> Does this sound reasonable?

I haven't looked in bitmap details, but can't we reuse genalloc?

-- 
regards,
Stan