[PATCH v4 0/3] dma-mapping: Patches for speeding up allocation

Douglas Anderson dianders at chromium.org
Thu Jan 7 16:36:42 PST 2016


This series of 3 patches will speed up memory allocation in dma-mapping
quite a bit.

The first patch ("ARM: dma-mapping: Optimize allocation") is hopefully
not terribly controversial: it merely doesn't try as hard to allocate
big chunks once it gets the first failure.  Since it's unlikely that
further big chunks will help (they're not likely to be virtually aligned
anyway), this should give a big speedup with no real regression to speak
of.  Yes, things could be made better, but this seems like a sane start.

The second patch ("common: DMA-mapping: add DMA_ATTR_NOHUGEPAGE
attribute") models MADV_NOHUGEPAGE as I understand it.  Hopefully folks
are happy with following that lead.  It does nothing by itself.

The third patch ("ARM: dma-mapping: Use DMA_ATTR_NOHUGEPAGE hint to
optimize allocation") simply applies the 2nd patch.  Again it's pretty
simple.  ...and again it does nothing by itself.

Notably missing from this series is the fourth patch that adds teeth to
the second and third.  You can find that out of tree at
<https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/c/320498/>.  Unfortunately
the rk3288_vpu, which is what I'm working on, is out of tree.

All testing was done on the chromeos kernel-3.14.  Sanity (compile /
boot) testing was done on a v4.4-rc6-based kernel.

Also note that v2 of this series had an extra patch
<https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/7888861/> that would attempt to sort
the allocation results to opportunistically get some extra alignment.  I
dropped that, but it could be re-introduced if there was interest.  I
found that it did give a little extra alignment sometimes, but maybe not
enough to justify the extra complexity.  It also was a bit half-baked
since it really should have tried harder to ensure alignment.

Changes in v4:
- renamed DMA_ATTR_SEQUENTIAL to DMA_ATTR_NOHUGEPAGE
- added Marek's ack

Changes in v3:
- add DMA_ATTR_SEQUENTIAL attribute new for v3
- Use DMA_ATTR_SEQUENTIAL hint patch new for v3.

Changes in v2:
- No longer just 1 page at a time, but gives up higher order quickly.
- Only tries important higher order allocations that might help us.

Douglas Anderson (3):
  ARM: dma-mapping: Optimize allocation
  common: DMA-mapping: add DMA_ATTR_NOHUGEPAGE attribute
  ARM: dma-mapping: Use DMA_ATTR_NOHUGEPAGE hint to optimize allocation

 Documentation/DMA-attributes.txt | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 arch/arm/mm/dma-mapping.c        | 38 ++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------
 include/linux/dma-attrs.h        |  1 +
 3 files changed, 48 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-)

-- 
2.6.0.rc2.230.g3dd15c0




More information about the linux-arm-kernel mailing list