[PATCH v2 0/8] arm64: Unmap FF-A lent memory from direct map

[Sumit Garg]

On Tue, 29 Sep 2026 at 12:33:07 +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
>On Sat, Sep 26, 2026 at 05:43:08PM +0530, Sumit Garg wrote:
>> Looks like you dropped me from your reply.
>
>Huh, that's weird. If I hit reply-all ('g') in mutt, it moves the entire
>CC list to To: and drops you. I suspect the same thing happened to Thierry
>when he replied here:
>
>https://lore.kernel.org/all/arJcN60nagFKXj2Q@orome/
>
>I can't figure out why that's happening :/
>I manually tried to fix the To: and Cc: lines in this message.

Thanks.

>
>> On Tue, 22 Sep 2026 at 15:55:59 +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
>> > I spoke to Brendan at LPC (?) last year but this doesn't really work
>> > for arm64 because it relies on being able to unmap arbitrary parts of
>> > the linear map, which isn't generally possible unless you force pte-level
>> > mappings for everything, which is prohibitive for perf/power.
>>
>> As per the cover letter it's about allocating pages that are not present
>> in the direct map. This essentially fits the protected DMABufs use-case
>> where we don't want any kernel mapping to exist at any time. Bufers
>> allocated from protected DMABufs are only meant to be accessed by the
>> TEE implementation or HW accelerators like in the secure media pipeline.
>
>That sounds like it should probably build on top of this series, then.

The main problem I see with this series is it tries to move from the generic
CMA allocator to a reserved FF-A CMA pool which again comes from the
DT. We already support reserved pool allocations via "no-map" which are
discovered dynamically from OP-TEE.

If we can rather support a generic CMA like allocator for arm64 which
can support unmapped allocations then I am all for it. These platform
specific reserved pools isn't a scalable solution.

>You could allocate the DMABufs from a CMA region that has no linear alias.

Allocation from generic CMA pool is already the case here:

tee_shm_alloc_dma_mem() ->
   dma_alloc_pages()

Do you mean it's just fine to unmap buffers allocated from generic CMA
region since it doesn't have any linear alias?

>
>> > Vincent's series tackles that by using a pool so that only that part of
>> > memory requires the pte-level mappings in the linear map. That's the
>> > whole point of it, so I don't think it makes sense to drop it in favour
>> > of Brendan's approach (which doesn't work).
>> >
>>
>> For protected DMABufs, we even don't require any pte-level mappings in
>> linear map. The whole idea of mapping and unmapping is just a bottleneck
>> for performance sensitive secure media pipeline use-cases. That's why if
>> we can support __GFP_UNMAPPED with the memory allocator on arm64 would
>> be the best fit for this use-case.
>
>The point is that you will require pte-level mappings for the linear map
>if you want to unmap from it at runtime on arm64. If you don't, then you
>can end up needing to split a block mapping (e.g. pmd-level) when you
>decide to unmap only part of it and there isn't a safe way to do that on
>arm64 without transiently unmapping the entire block, which can lead to
>fatal translation faults during that window.

I agree with you here, what I am rather trying to find if on arm64 there
is any possibilty to have a generic allocator for unmapped pages. That's
the use-case here as well as what Brendan't patch-set was trying to address.

>
>> Now the question is why arm64 can't support __GFP_UNMAPPED similar to
>> how Brendan is doing it for x86?
>
>Because arm64 != x86? Presumably x86 doesn't have the strict
>break-before-make requirements we have on arm64.
>

Sure, sounds like you are eluding to that the generic MM flag
__GFP_UNMAPPED being proposed can't be supported on arm64, right?

-Sumit