[PATCH v3 00/13] mm, dma, arm64: Reduce ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN to 8

[Petr Tesarik]

On 4/19/2023 6:06 PM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 11:38:47AM -0700, Isaac Manjarres wrote:
>[...]>> Given this, I don't think there's anything blocking this series from
>> being merged. The requirement for SWIOTLB to get to the minimum
>> kmalloc alignment down to 8 bytes shouldn't prevent this series from
>> being merged, as the amount of memory that is allocated for SWIOTLB
>> can be configured through the commandline to minimize the impact of
>> having SWIOTLB memory. Additionally, even if no SWIOTLB is present,
>> this series still offers memory savings on a lot of ARM64 platforms
>> by using the cache line size as the minimum alignment for kmalloc.
> 
> Actually, there's some progress on the swiotlb front to allow dynamic
> allocation. I haven't reviewed the series yet (I wasn't aware of it
> until v2) but at a quick look, it limits the dynamic allocation to
> bouncing buffers of at least a page size. Maybe this can be later
> improved for buffers below ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN.

Indeed. My patch allocates dynamic bounce buffers with
dma_direct_alloc_pages() to keep things simple for now, but there is no
real reason against allocating less than a page with another suitable
allocator.

However, I'd be interested what the use case is, so I can assess the
performance impact, which depends on workload, and FYI it may not even
be negative. ;-)

Petr Tesarik