Hi John, Thanks for your feedback
On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 11:42:58AM -0700, John Stultz wrote: > On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 6:57 AM Maxime Ripard <mrip...@kernel.org> wrote: > > This series is the follow-up of the discussion that John and I had a few > > months ago here: > > > > https://lore.kernel.org/all/candhncqujn6bh3kxkf65bwitylvqsd9892-xtfdhhqqyrro...@mail.gmail.com/ > > > > The initial problem we were discussing was that I'm currently working on > > a platform which has a memory layout with ECC enabled. However, enabling > > the ECC has a number of drawbacks on that platform: lower performance, > > increased memory usage, etc. So for things like framebuffers, the > > trade-off isn't great and thus there's a memory region with ECC disabled > > to allocate from for such use cases. > > > > After a suggestion from John, I chose to start using heap allocations > > flags to allow for userspace to ask for a particular ECC setup. This is > > then backed by a new heap type that runs from reserved memory chunks > > flagged as such, and the existing DT properties to specify the ECC > > properties. > > > > We could also easily extend this mechanism to support more flags, or > > through a new ioctl to discover which flags a given heap supports. > > Hey! Thanks for sending this along! I'm eager to see more heap related > work being done upstream. > > The only thing that makes me a bit hesitant, is the introduction of > allocation flags (as opposed to a uniquely specified/named "ecc" > heap). > > We did talk about this earlier, and my earlier press that only if the > ECC flag was general enough to apply to the majority of heaps then it > makes sense as a flag, and your patch here does apply it to all the > heaps. So I don't have an objection. > > But it makes me a little nervous to add a new generic allocation flag > for a feature most hardware doesn't support (yet, at least). So it's > hard to weigh how common the actual usage will be across all the > heaps. > > I apologize as my worry is mostly born out of seeing vendors really > push opaque feature flags in their old ion heaps, so in providing a > flags argument, it was mostly intended as an escape hatch for > obviously common attributes. So having the first be something that > seems reasonable, but isn't actually that common makes me fret some. > > So again, not an objection, just something for folks to stew on to > make sure this is really the right approach. I understand your hesitation and concern :) Is there anything we could provide that would help moving the discussion forward? > Another thing to discuss, that I didn't see in your mail: Do we have > an open-source user of this new flag? Not at the moment. I guess it would be one of the things that would reduce your concerns, but is it a requirement? Thanks! Maxime
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