Re: [PATCH RFC 06/12] dma: direct: Provide accessor to dmem region

Maxime Ripard
2025-03-13T18:17:01Z

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On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 06:44:51PM +0000, Robin Murphy wrote:
> On 2025-03-10 4:28 pm, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 02:56:37PM +0000, Robin Murphy wrote:
> > > On 2025-03-10 12:06 pm, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > > > Consumers of the direct DMA API will have to know which region their
> > > > device allocate from in order for them to charge the memory allocation
> > > > in the right one.
> > >
> > > This doesn't seem to make much sense - dma-direct is not an allocator
> > > itself, it just provides the high-level dma_alloc_attrs/dma_alloc_pages/etc.
> > > interfaces wherein the underlying allocations _could_ come from CMA, but
> > > also a per-device coherent/restricted pool, or a global coherent/atomic
> > > pool, or the regular page allocator, or in one weird corner case the SWIOTLB
> > > buffer, or...
> >
> > I guess it wasn't super clear, but what I meant is that it's an
> > allocator to the consumer: it gets called, and returns a buffer. How it
> > does so is transparent to the device, and on the other side of the
> > abstraction.
> >
> > I do agree that the logic is complicated to follow, and that's what I
> > was getting at in the cover letter.
>
> Right, but ultimately my point is that when we later end up with:
>
> struct dmem_cgroup_region *
> dma_get_dmem_cgroup_region(struct device *dev)
> {
> if (dma_alloc_direct(dev, get_dma_ops(dev)))
> return dma_direct_get_dmem_cgroup_region(dev);
>
> = dma_contiguous_get_dmem_cgroup_region(dev);
>
> it's objectively wrong given what dma_alloc_direct() means in context:
>
> void *dma_alloc_attrs(...)
> {
> if (dma_alloc_direct(dev, ops))
> cpu_addr = dma_direct_alloc(...);
>
> where dma_direct_alloc() may then use at least 5 different allocation
> methods, only one of which is CMA. Accounting things which are not CMA to
> CMA seems to thoroughly defeat the purpose of having such fine-grained
> accounting at all.
>
> This is why the very notion of "consumers of dma-direct" should
> fundamentally not be a thing IMO. Drivers consume the DMA API interfaces,
> and the DMA API ultimately consumes various memory allocators, but what
> happens in between is nobody else's business; dma-direct happens to
> represent *some* paths between the two, but there are plenty more paths to
> the same (and different) allocators through other DMA API implementations as
> well. Which route a particular call takes to end up at a particular
> allocator is not meaningful unless you are the DMA ops dispatch code.
>
> Or to put it another way, to even go for the "dumbest possible correct
> solution", the plumbing of dma_get_dmem_cgroup_region() would need to be
> about as complex and widespread as the plumbing of dma_alloc_attrs() itself
> ;)

I largely agree with the sentiment, and I think the very idea of
dma_get_dmem_cgroup_region() is a bad one for that reason. But since I
wasn't too sure what a good one might look like, I figured it would be a
good way to start the discussion still :)

> I think I see why a simple DMA attribute couldn't be made to work, as
> dmem_cgroup_uncharge() can't simply look up the pool the same way
> dmem_cgroup_try_charge() found it, since we still need a cg for that and
> get_current_dmemcs() can't be assumed to be stable over time, right?
> At the point I'm probably starting to lean towards a whole new DMA op with a
> properly encapsulated return type (and maybe a long-term goal of
> consolidating the 3 or 4 different allocation type we already have)

It felt like a good solution to me too, and what I alluded to with
struct page or folio. My feeling was that the best way to do it would be
to encapsulate it into the structure returned by the dma_alloc_* API.
That's a pretty large rework though, so I wanted to make sure I was on
the right path before doing so.

> or just have a single dmem region for "DMA API memory" and don't care
> where it came from (although I do see the issues with that too - you
> probably wouldn't want to ration a device-private pool the same way as
> global system memory, for example)

Yeah, the CMA pool is probably something you want to limit differently
as well.

Maxime

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