Re: User switchable HW mappings & cie

[Thomas Hellström <thomas@tungstengraphics.com>]

Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

> Hi !
>
> I'd like to kick a discussion about some issues I've been having along
> with some proposed solutions related to mapping of bits of hardware in
> smarter ways than simply doing a io_remap_pfn_range() and the problems,
> generally caused by get_user_pages().
>
>  
...

> The Tungstengrpahics folks (Thomas is on CC) have been working on some
> better memory management to properly handle those things in the DRM. One
> of the things we want to do here is similar to what the SPUs do with
> local store: have a single VMA associated with an object, and have the
> PTEs transparently changed to map either video memory, system memory,
> AGP memory, etc... (the different in cache attributes can be ignored at
> this stage, we can discuss it separately if interested).
>
> I've been suggesting a similar approach as we use for SPUs. That is what
> would make the most sense from a user standpoint: user code access their
> "objects" via a single virtual pointer and the DRM takes care of
> migrating it when necessary (for example migrating it to video RAM when
> it needs to be used by the engine and "swap" it back to main memory when
> not).
>
>
>  
...

> The base idea is that we would have the no_page() function of SPU's or
> the DRM either return a struct page when the object is backed to main
> memory, or install the PTE directly (using the helper to hide some of
> the low level TLB flushing logic etc...) and then return NOPAGE_REFAULT
> when hitting the hardware. The helper basically is a one-page version of
> io_remap_pfn_range() with the added "feature" of not doing anything if
> the PTE has been set by somebody else (handle the race case) instead of
> BUG'ing as the current io_remap_pfn_range() does.
>
>  
I'm very much for this approach, possibly with the extension that we 
could have a multiple-page version as well, as populating the whole vma 
sometimes may be cheaper than populating each pte with a fault. That 
would basically be an io_remap_pfn_range() which is safe when the 
mmap_sem is taken in read mode (from do_no_page).

One problem that occurs is that the rule for ptes with non-backing 
struct pages
Which I think was introduced in 2.6.16:

   pfn_of_page == vma->vm_pgoff + ((addr - vma->vm_start) >> PAGE_SHIFT)

cannot be honored, at least not with the DRM memory manager, since the 
graphics object will be associated with a vma and not the underlying 
physical address. User space will have vma->vm_pgoff as a handle to the 
object, which may move around in graphics memory.

/Thomas





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