[PATCH 0/2] Revert support for reserved memory regions defined in device tree

[Grant Likely]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2013 09:27:26 +0200, Marek Szyprowski <m.szyprowski at samsung.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> Benjamin Herrenschmidt pointed a few issues in the proposed design of
> device tree bindings for contiguous memory allocator and reserved memory
> regions:
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/15/151
> http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg273548.html
> 
> Some time has passed, but there is still no consensus on the bindings
> for the reserved memory and various drawback of this solution has been
> shown, so in my opinion the best I can do now is to revert them
> completely and start from scratch again later.

Hi Marek,

At the ARM summit last week in Edinburgh, several of us sat down and
hammered out a new proposal for handling reserved memory regions based
on the work that you started here. Below you will find a new binding
document. I started looking at implementing this, but haven't made much
progress.

Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Also, while I'm thinking about it, I took another look at the code and I
think the code supporting reserved regions should go directly into
drivers/of/fdt.c and drivers/of/memory.c.  Also, the reserved regions
parsing should be enabled unconditionally insted of filtered by (DMA_CMA
|| (HAVE_GENERIC_DMA_COHERENT && HAVE_MEMBLOCK). If the hardware
description says to reserve a region, then the kernel must always do so,
even if it doesn't actually use it for anything.

g.

-------

*** Reserved memory regions ***

Reserved memory is specified as a node under the /reserved-memory node.
The operating system shall exclude reserved memory from normal usage
one can create child nodes describing particular reserved (excluded from
normal use) memory regions. Such memory regions are usually designed for
the special usage by various device drivers.

Parameters for each memory region can be encoded into the device tree
with the following nodes:

/reserved-memory node
---------------------
#address-cells, #size-cells (required) - standard definition
    - Should use the same values as the root node
ranges (required) - standard definition
    - Should be empty

/reserved-memory/ child nodes
-----------------------------
Each child of the reserved-memory node specifies one or more regions of
reserved memory. Each child node may either use a 'reg' property to
specify a specific range of reserved memory, or a 'size' property with
optional constraints to request a dynamically allocated block of memory.

Following the generic-names recommended practice, node names should
reflect the purpose of the node (ie. "framebuffer" or "dma-pool"). Unit
address (@<address>) should be appended to the name if the node is a
static allocation.

Properties:
Requires either a) or b) below.
a) static allocation
   reg (required) - standard definition
b) dynamic allocation
   size (required) - length based on parent's #size-cells
                   - Size in bytes of memory to reserve.
   alignment (optional) - length based on parent's #size-cells
                        - Address boundary for alignment of allocation.
   alloc-ranges (optional) - prop-encoded-array (address, length pairs).
                           - Specifies regions of memory that are
                             acceptable to allocate from.

If both reg and size are present, then the reg property takes precedence
and size is ignored.

Additional properties:
compatible (optional) - standard definition
    - may contain the following strings:
        - shared-dma-pool: This indicates a region of memory meant to be
          used as a shared pool of DMA buffers for a set of devices. It can
          be used by an operating system to instanciate the necessary pool
          management subsystem if necessary.
        - vendor specific string in the form <vendor>,[<device>-]<usage>
no-map (optional) - empty property
    - Indicates the operating system must not create a virtual mapping
      of the region as part of its standard mapping of system memory,
      nor permit speculative access to it under any circumstances other
      than under the control of the device driver using the region.
reusable (optional) - empty property
    - The operating system can use the memory in this region with the
      limitation that the device driver(s) owning the region need to be
      able to reclaim it back. Typically that means that the operating
      system can use that region to store volatile or cached data that
      can be otherwise regenerated or migrated elsewhere.

Linux implementation note:
- If a "linux,cma-default" property is present, then Linux will use the
  region for the default pool of the contiguous memory allocator.

Device node references to reserved memory
-----------------------------------------
Regions in the /reserved-memory node may be referenced by other device
nodes by adding a memory-region property to the device node.

memory-region (optional) - phandle to child of /reserved-memory

Example
-------
This example defines 3 contiguous regions are defined for Linux kernel:
one default of all device drivers (named linux,cma at 72000000 and 64MiB in size),
one dedicated to the framebuffer device (named framebuffer at 78000000, 8MiB), and
one for multimedia processing (named multimedia-memory at 77000000, 64MiB).

/ {
	#address-cells = <1>;
	#size-cells = <1>;

	memory {
		reg = <0x40000000 0x40000000>;
	};

	reserved-memory {
		#address-cells = <1>;
		#size-cells = <1>;
		ranges;

		/* global autoconfigured region for contiguous allocations */
		linux,cma {
			compatible = "shared-dma-pool";
			size = <0x4000000>;
			alignment = <0x2000>;
			linux,cma-default;
		};

		display_reserved: framebuffer at 78000000 {
			reg = <0x78000000 0x800000>;
		};

		multimedia_reserved: multimedia at 77000000 {
			compatible = "acme,multimedia-memory";
			reg = <0x77000000 0x4000000>;
		};
	};

	/* ... */

	fb0: video at 12300000 {
		memory-region = <&display_reserved>;
		/* ... */
	};

	scaler: scaler at 12500000 {
		memory-region = <&multimedia_reserved>;
		/* ... */
	};

	codec: codec at 12600000 {
		memory-region = <&multimedia_reserved>;
		/* ... */
	};
};