Re: [RFC PATCH 1/5] dt-bindings: dma: Add CMA Heap bindings

[Florent Tomasin <florent.tomasin@arm.com>]

On 12/02/2025 10:49, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 10:29:32AM +0000, Florent Tomasin wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 12/02/2025 10:01, Maxime Ripard wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 09:49:56AM +0000, Florent Tomasin wrote:
>>>> Note that the CMA patches were initially shared to help reproduce my
>>>> environment of development, I can isolate them in a separate patch
>>>> series and include a reference or "base-commit:" tag to it in the
>>>> Panthor protected mode RFC, to help progress this review in another
>>>> thread. It will avoid overlapping these two topics:
>>>>
>>>> - Multiple standalone CMA heaps support
>>>> - Panthor protected mode handling
>>>
>>> You keep insisting on using CMA here, but it's really not clear to me
>>> why you would need CMA in the first place.
>>>
>>> By CMA, do you mean the CMA allocator, and thus would provide buffers
>>> through the usual dma_alloc_* API, or would any allocator providing
>>> physically contiguous memory work?
>>
>> You are correct only the CMA allocator is relevant. I needed a way to
>> sub-allocate from a carved-out memory.
> 
> I'm still confused, sorry. You're saying that you require CMA but...

Adding to Boris's comment, the objective here was to enable
sub-allocation from a carved-out memory region. The CMA heap
was used for convinience. It can be any other heap driver that
allows allocating a protected buffer.

>>> In the latter case, would something like this work:
>>> https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240515-dma-buf-ecc-heap-v1-1-54cbbd049511@kernel.org/
>>
>> Thanks for sharing this link, I was not aware previous work was done
>> on this aspect. The new carveout heap introduced in the series could
>> probably be a good alternative. I will play-around with it and share
>> some updates.
> 
> ... you seem to be ok with a driver that doesn't use it?

I will confirm it once I have done some validation.

From Panthor driver point of view, it does not matter if the we use CMA,
or alternative heaps. We just need to be able to allocate from a
protected heap. I used the CMA heap to simplify the developpment of the
feature, it can be anything.

I will extract the CMA changes from the V2 of the RFC to prevent
confusion.

Regards,
Florent