Re: [PATCH 3/9] dma-heap: Provide accessors so that in-kernel drivers can allocate dmabufs from specific heaps

From: John Stultz <jstultz@google.com>
To: "Christian König" <christian.koenig@amd.com>
Cc: devicetree@vger.kernel.org, Conor Dooley <conor+dt@kernel.org>,
	jianjiao.zeng@mediatek.com,
	Benjamin Gaignard <benjamin.gaignard@collabora.com>,
	kuohong.wang@mediatek.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org, linaro-mm-sig@lists.linaro.org,
	Rob Herring <robh+dt@kernel.org>,
	linux-mediatek@lists.infradead.org,
	linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org,
	Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzysztof.kozlowski+dt@linaro.org>,
	Matthias Brugger <matthias.bgg@gmail.com>,
	tjmercier@google.com, linux-media@vger.kernel.org,
	Sumit Semwal <sumit.semwal@linaro.org>,
	Yong Wu <yong.wu@mediatek.com>,
	AngeloGioacchino Del Regno
	<angelogioacchino.delregno@collabora.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/9] dma-heap: Provide accessors so that in-kernel drivers can allocate dmabufs from specific heaps
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2023 11:29:15 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANDhNCrQyiFZ+8DnG0iyKBXC0H1698K1a9d2AxOq4whDsZBn+Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <803846bc-fd1d-d2ec-2855-456af22c82f8@amd.com>

On Mon, Sep 11, 2023 at 3:14 AM Christian König
<christian.koenig@amd.com> wrote:
> Am 11.09.23 um 04:30 schrieb Yong Wu:
> > From: John Stultz <jstultz@google.com>
> >
> > This allows drivers who don't want to create their own
> > DMA-BUF exporter to be able to allocate DMA-BUFs directly
> > from existing DMA-BUF Heaps.
> >
> > There is some concern that the premise of DMA-BUF heaps is
> > that userland knows better about what type of heap memory
> > is needed for a pipeline, so it would likely be best for
> > drivers to import and fill DMA-BUFs allocated by userland
> > instead of allocating one themselves, but this is still
> > up for debate.
>
> The main design goal of having DMA-heaps in the first place is to avoid
> per driver allocation and this is not necessary because userland know
> better what type of memory it wants.
>
> The background is rather that we generally want to decouple allocation
> from having a device driver connection so that we have better chance
> that multiple devices can work with the same memory.

Yep, very much agreed, and this is what the comment above is trying to describe.

Ideally user-allocated buffers would be used to ensure driver's don't
create buffers with constraints that limit which devices the buffers
might later be shared with.

However, this patch was created as a hold-over from the old ION logic
to help vendors transition to dmabuf heaps, as vendors had situations
where they still wanted to export dmabufs that were not to be
generally shared and folks wanted to avoid duplication of logic
already in existing heaps.  At the time, I never pushed it upstream as
there were no upstream users.  But I think if there is now a potential
upstream user, it's worth having the discussion to better understand
the need.

So I think this patch is a little confusing in this series, as I don't
see much of it actually being used here (though forgive me if I'm
missing it).

Instead, It seems it get used in a separate patch series here:
  https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230911125936.10648-1-yunfei.dong@mediatek.com/

Yong, I appreciate you sending this out! But maybe if the secure heap
submission doesn't depend on this functionality, I might suggest
moving this patch (or at least the majority of it) to be part of the
vcodec series instead?  That way reviewers will have more context for
how the code being added is used?

thanks
-john