[RFC PATCH 00/12] Ion cleanup in preparation for moving out of staging

[Laura Abbott]

On 03/13/2017 03:54 AM, Brian Starkey wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 02:34:14PM +0100, Benjamin Gaignard wrote:
>> 2017-03-09 18:38 GMT+01:00 Laura Abbott <labbott at redhat.com>:
>>> On 03/09/2017 02:00 AM, Benjamin Gaignard wrote:
>>>> 2017-03-06 17:04 GMT+01:00 Daniel Vetter <daniel at ffwll.ch>:
>>>>> On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 11:58:05AM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 11:40:41AM +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> No one gave a thing about android in upstream, so Greg KH just dumped it
>>>>>>> all into staging/android/. We've discussed ION a bunch of times, recorded
>>>>>>> anything we'd like to fix in staging/android/TODO, and Laura's patch
>>>>>>> series here addresses a big chunk of that.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> This is pretty much the same approach we (gpu folks) used to de-stage the
>>>>>>> syncpt stuff.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Well, there's also the fact that quite a few people have issues with the
>>>>>> design (like Laurent).  It seems like a lot of them have either got more
>>>>>> comfortable with it over time, or at least not managed to come up with
>>>>>> any better ideas in the meantime.
>>>>>
>>>>> See the TODO, it has everything a really big group (look at the patch for
>>>>> the full Cc: list) figured needs to be improved at LPC 2015. We don't just
>>>>> merge stuff because merging stuff is fun :-)
>>>>>
>>>>> Laurent was even in that group ...
>>>>> -Daniel
>>>>
>>>> For me those patches are going in the right direction.
>>>>
>>>> I still have few questions:
>>>> - since alignment management has been remove from ion-core, should it
>>>> be also removed from ioctl structure ?
>>>
>>> Yes, I think I'm going to go with the suggestion to fixup the ABI
>>> so we don't need the compat layer and as part of that I'm also
>>> dropping the align argument.
>>>
>>>> - can you we ride off ion_handle (at least in userland) and only
>>>> export a dma-buf descriptor ?
>>>
>>> Yes, I think this is the right direction given we're breaking
>>> everything anyway. I was debating trying to keep the two but
>>> moving to only dma bufs is probably cleaner. The only reason
>>> I could see for keeping the handles is running out of file
>>> descriptors for dma-bufs but that seems unlikely.
>>>>
>>>> In the future how can we add new heaps ?
>>>> Some platforms have very specific memory allocation
>>>> requirements (just have a look in the number of gem custom allocator in drm)
>>>> Do you plan to add heap type/mask for each ?
>>>
>>> Yes, that was my thinking.
>>
>> My concern is about the policy to adding heaps, will you accept
>> "customs" heap per
>> platforms ? per devices ? or only generic ones ?
>> If you are too strict, we will have lot of out-of-tree heaps and if
>> you accept of of them
>> it will be a nightmare to maintain....
>>
> 
> Are you concerned about actual heaps (e.g. a carveout at 0x80000000 vs
> a carveout at 0x60000000) or heap types?
> 
> For heap types, I think the policy can be strict - if it's generally
> useful then it should live in-tree in ion. Otherwise, it would be
> out-of-tree. I'd expect most "custom" heaps to be parameterisable to
> the point of being generally useful.
> 

I'm willing to be reasonably permissive in what lives in tree. A good
example would be something like a heap for the OMAP tiler which had
weird hardware requirements. The associated devices that go with the
heap should be well supported upstream though.

> For actual heap instances, I would expect them to be communicated via
> reserved-memory regions or something similar, and so the maintenance
> burden is pretty low.
> 

Yes. After the next round of review for this series I'm going to
start thinking about properties for chunk and carveout heaps if nobody
proposes something first.

> The existing query ioctl can allow heap IDs to get assigned
> dynamically at runtime, so there's no need to reserve "bit 6" for
> "CUSTOM_ACME_HEAP_1"
> 
>> Another point is how can we put secure rules (like selinux policy) on
>> heaps since all the allocations
>> go to the same device (/dev/ion) ? For example, until now, in Android
>> we have to give the same
>> access rights to all the process that use ION.
>> It will become problem when we will add secure heaps because we won't
>> be able to distinguish secure
>> processes to standard ones or set specific policy per heaps.
>> Maybe I'm wrong here but I have never see selinux policy checking an
>> ioctl field but if that
>> exist it could be a solution.
>>
> 
> I might be thinking of a different type of "secure", but...
> 
> Should the security of secure heaps be enforced by OS-level
> permissions? I don't know about other architectures, but at least on
> arm/arm64 this is enforced in hardware; it doesn't matter who has
> access to the ion heap, because only secure devices (or the CPU
> running a secure process) is physically able to access the memory
> backing the buffer.
> 
> In fact, in the use-cases I know of, the process asking for the ion
> allocation is not a secure process, and so we wouldn't *want* to
> restrict the secure heap to be allocated from only by secure
> processes.
> 
> -Brian
> 
>>>
>>>>