On Mon, Feb 9, 2026 at 7:38 AM Jiri Pirko <[email protected]> wrote: > > From: Jiri Pirko <[email protected]> > > Currently the flags, which are unused, are validated for all heaps. > Since the follow-up patch introduces a flag valid for only one of the > heaps, allow to specify the valid flags per-heap.
I'm not really in this space anymore, so take my feedback with a grain of salt. While the heap allocate flags argument is unused, it was intended to be used for generic allocation flags that would apply to all or at least a wide majority of heaps. It was definitely not added to allow for per-heap or heap specific flags (as this patch tries to utilize it). That was the mess we had with ION driver that we were trying to avoid. The intent of dma-buf heaps is to try to abstract all the different device memory constraints so there only needs to be a [usage] -> [heap] mapping, and otherwise userland can be generalized so that it doesn't need to be re-written to work with different devices/memory types. Adding heap-specific allocation flags prevents that generalization. So instead of adding heap specific flags, the general advice has been to add a separate heap name for the flag property. Now, there has been many discussions around "protected buffers" (which doesn't seem to map exactly to this confidental computing primitive, but sounds like it might be related) , which have bounced between being a allocation flag or a device specific heap without much resolution. I appreciate in this patch seires you've pushed your concept down into a DMA_ATTR_, as I do feel the kernel should have a deeper sense of protected buffers (or any general propery like this) as a concept if it is going to be a generic allocation flag, instead of it being a somewhat thin creation of the outer heap-driver layer. But, it seems like the use case here is still far too narrow for a top level allocation flag. So I'd advocate against introducing heap-specific flags like this. thanks -john
