Re: [PATCH 0/3] Allow restricted-dma-pool to customize IO_TLB_SEGSIZE

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Wed Nov 24 2021 - 07:39:17 EST


On 2021-11-24 03:55, Hsin-Yi Wang wrote:
On Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 7:58 PM Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2021-11-23 11:21, Hsin-Yi Wang wrote:
Default IO_TLB_SEGSIZE (128) slabs may be not enough for some use cases.
This series adds support to customize io_tlb_segsize for each
restricted-dma-pool.

Example use case:

mtk-isp drivers[1] are controlled by mtk-scp[2] and allocate memory through
mtk-scp. In order to use the noncontiguous DMA API[3], we need to use
the swiotlb pool. mtk-scp needs to allocate memory with 2560 slabs.
mtk-isp drivers also needs to allocate memory with 200+ slabs. Both are
larger than the default IO_TLB_SEGSIZE (128) slabs.

Are drivers really doing streaming DMA mappings that large? If so, that
seems like it might be worth trying to address in its own right for the
sake of efficiency - allocating ~5MB of memory twice and copying it back
and forth doesn't sound like the ideal thing to do.

If it's really about coherent DMA buffer allocation, I thought the plan
was that devices which expect to use a significant amount and/or size of
coherent buffers would continue to use a shared-dma-pool for that? It's
still what the binding implies. My understanding was that
swiotlb_alloc() is mostly just a fallback for the sake of drivers which
mostly do streaming DMA but may allocate a handful of pages worth of
coherent buffers here and there. Certainly looking at the mtk_scp
driver, that seems like it shouldn't be going anywhere near SWIOTLB at all.

mtk_scp on its own can use the shared-dma-pool, which it currently uses.
The reason we switched to restricted-dma-pool is that we want to use
the noncontiguous DMA API for mtk-isp. The noncontiguous DMA API is
designed for devices with iommu, and if a device doesn't have an
iommu, it will fallback using swiotlb. But currently noncontiguous DMA
API doesn't work with the shared-dma-pool.

vb2_dc_alloc() -> dma_alloc_noncontiguous() -> alloc_single_sgt() ->
__dma_alloc_pages() -> dma_direct_alloc_pages() ->
__dma_direct_alloc_pages() -> swiotlb_alloc().

OK, thanks for clarifying. My gut feeling is that drivers should probably only be calling the noncontiguous API when they *know* that they have a scatter-gather-capable device or IOMMU that can cope with it, but either way I'm still not convinced that it makes sense to hack up SWIOTLB with DT ABI baggage for an obscure fallback case. It would seem a lot more sensible to fix alloc_single_sgt() to not ignore per-device pools once it has effectively fallen back to the normal dma_alloc_attrs() flow, but I guess that's not technically guaranteed to uphold the assumption that we can allocate struct-page-backed memory.

Still, if we've got to the point of needing to use a SWIOTLB pool as nothing more than a bad reinvention of CMA, rather than an actual bounce buffer, that reeks of a fundamental design issue and adding more hacks on top to bodge around it is not the right way to go - we need to take a step back and properly reconsider how dma_alloc_noncontiguous() is supposed to interact with DMA protection schemes.

Thanks,
Robin.

[1] (not in upstream) https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-media/cover/20190611035344.29814-1-jungo.lin@xxxxxxxxxxxx/
[2] https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/drivers/remoteproc/mtk_scp.c
[3] https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-media/cover/20210909112430.61243-1-senozhatsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx/

Hsin-Yi Wang (3):
dma: swiotlb: Allow restricted-dma-pool to customize IO_TLB_SEGSIZE
dt-bindings: Add io-tlb-segsize property for restricted-dma-pool
arm64: dts: mt8183: use restricted swiotlb for scp mem

.../reserved-memory/shared-dma-pool.yaml | 8 +++++
.../arm64/boot/dts/mediatek/mt8183-kukui.dtsi | 4 +--
include/linux/swiotlb.h | 1 +
kernel/dma/swiotlb.c | 34 ++++++++++++++-----
4 files changed, 37 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)

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