Skip to content
  • Nicolas Boichat's avatar
    mm: add support for kmem caches in DMA32 zone · 6d6ea1e9
    Nicolas Boichat authored
    Patch series "iommu/io-pgtable-arm-v7s: Use DMA32 zone for page tables",
    v6.
    
    This is a followup to the discussion in [1], [2].
    
    IOMMUs using ARMv7 short-descriptor format require page tables (level 1
    and 2) to be allocated within the first 4GB of RAM, even on 64-bit
    systems.
    
    For L1 tables that are bigger than a page, we can just use
    __get_free_pages with GFP_DMA32 (on arm64 systems only, arm would still
    use GFP_DMA).
    
    For L2 tables that only take 1KB, it would be a waste to allocate a full
    page, so we considered 3 approaches:
     1. This series, adding support for GFP_DMA32 slab caches.
     2. genalloc, which requires pre-allocating the maximum number of L2 page
        tables (4096, so 4MB of memory).
     3. page_frag, which is not very memory-efficient as it is unable to reuse
        freed fragments until the whole page is freed. [3]
    
    This series is the most memory-efficient approach.
    
    stable@ note:
      We confirmed that this is a regression, and IOMMU errors happen on 4.19...
    6d6ea1e9