On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 5:08 AM, Tomi Valkeinen tomi.valkeinen@ti.com wrote:

Hi,

OMAP has a custom video ram allocator, which I'd like to remove and use the standard dma allocation functions.

There are two problems for which I'd like to hear suggestions or comments:

First one is that the dma_alloc_* functions map the allocated memory for cpu use. In many cases with OMAP DSS (display subsystem) this is not needed: the memory may be written only by the SGX or the DSP, and it's only read by the DSS, so it's never touched by the CPU.

see dma_alloc_attrs() and DMA_ATTR_NO_KERNEL_MAPPING

This is even more true when using VRFB on omap3 (and probably TILER on omap4) for rotation, as VRFB hides the actual memory and offers rotated views. In this case the backend memory is never accessed by anyone else than VRFB.

just fwiw, we don't actually need contiguous memory on o4/tiler :-)

(well, at least if you ignore things like secure playback)

Is there a way to allocate the memory without creating a mapping? While it won't break anything as such, the allocated areas can be quite large thus causing large areas of the kernel's memory space to be needlessly reserved.

The second case is passing a framebuffer address from the bootloader to the kernel. Often with mobile devices the bootloader will initialize the display hardware, showing a company logo or such. To keep the image on the screen when kernel starts we need to reserve the same physical memory area early at boot, and use that for the framebuffer.

with a bit of handwaving, this is possible. You can pass a base address to dma_declare_contiguous() when you setup your device's CMA pool. Although that doesn't really guarantee you're allocation from that pool is at offset zero, I suppose.

I'm not sure if there's any actual problem with this one, presuming there is a solution for the first case. Somehow the memory is reserved at early boot time, and this is passed to the fb driver. But can the memory be managed the same way as in normal case (for example freeing it), or does it need to be handled as a special case?

special-casing it might be better.. although possibly a dma attr could be added for this to tell dma_alloc_from_contiguous() that we need a particular address within the CMA pool. It seems a bit like a hack, but OTOH I guess pretty much every consumer device would need a hack like this.

BR, -R

Tomi