Re: 32-bit dma allocations on 64-bit platforms

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At 24 Jun 2004 01:46:44 +0200,
Andi Kleen wrote:
> 
> > > I must say I'm somewhat reluctant to break an working in tree driver.
> > > Especially for the sake of an out of tree binary driver. Arguably the
> > > problem is probably not limited to you, but it's quite possible that
> > > even the in tree DRI drivers have it, so it would be still worth to
> > > fix it.
> > 
> > agreed. I completely understand that there is no desire to modify the
> > core kernel to help our driver. that's one of the reasons I looked through
> > the other drivers, as I suspect that this is a problem for many drivers. I
> > only looked through the code for each briefly, but didn't see anything to
> > handle this. I suspect it's more of a case that the drivers have not been
> > stress tested on an x86_64 machine w/ 4+ G of memory.
> 
> We usually handle it using the swiotlb, which works.
> 
> pci_alloc_consistent is limited to 16MB, but so far nobody has really
> complained about that. If that should be a real issue we can make
> it allocate from the swiotlb pool, which is usually 64MB (and can
> be made bigger at boot time) 

Can't it be called with GFP_KERNEL at first, then with GFP_DMA if the
allocated pages are out of dma mask, just like in pci-gart.c?
(with ifdef x86-64)


Takashi