[PATCH 0/1][RFC] drm/ttm Improved io_mem_reserve / io_mem_free_calling

Thomas Hellstrom thellstrom at vmware.com
Thu Nov 11 00:41:56 PST 2010

The following patch is really intended for the next merge window.

1) Are there any implementations of driver::io_mem_reserve today that can't use
the fastpath?
2) Can we put an atomic requirement on driver::io_mem_reserve /

The patch improves on the io_mem_reserve / io_mem_free calling sequences by
introducing a fastpath and an optional eviction mechanism. 

The fastpath is enabled by default and is switched off by the driver setting
struct ttm_mem_type_manager::io_reserve_fastpath to false on mem type init.
With the fastpath no locking occurs, and io_mem_free is never called.
I'm not sure if there are any implementations today that could not use the

As mentioned in the patch, if the fastpath is disabled, calls to
io_mem_reserve and io_mem_free are exactly balanced, and refcounted within
struct ttm_mem_reg so that io_mem_reserve should never be called recursively
for the same struct ttm_mem_reg. 
Locking is required to make sure that ptes are never present on when the
underlying memory region is not reserved. Currently I'm using
man::io_reserve_mutex for this. Can we use a spinlock? That would require 
io_mem_reserve and io_mem_free to be atomic. 

Optionally, there is an eviction mechanism that is activated by setting
struct ttm_mem_type_manager::use_io_reserve_lru to true when initialized.
If the eviction mechanism is activated, and io_mem_reserve returns -EAGAIN,
it will attempt to kill user-space mappings to free up reserved regions.
Kernel mappings (ttm_bo_kmap) are not affected.


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