Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org designates 2620:137:e000::1:20 as permitted sender) client-ip=2620:137:e000::1:20;
Date:   Thu, 11 Aug 2022 09:49:46 +0200
From:   Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
To:     Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>
Cc:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        John Donnelly <john.p.donnelly@oracle.com>,
        David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] dma/pool: do not complain if DMA pool is not allocated
Message-ID: <20220811074946.GB14956@lst.de>
References: <20220325122559.14251-1-mhocko@kernel.org> <Yj28gjonUa9+0yae@dhcp22.suse.cz> <20220325164856.GA16800@lst.de> <Yj3zyLs4f+ba6UqF@dhcp22.suse.cz> <YupFSpXOrcfXJNya@dhcp22.suse.cz> <YuqNToCACD8kKBG+@MiWiFi-R3L-srv> <YuqOrJKcgfamdXkk@dhcp22.suse.cz> <YuqU87SDwP0zg+c7@MiWiFi-R3L-srv> <YuqX0OAItlMDfRUV@dhcp22.suse.cz> <YuunCO2lsLDWTGw+@MiWiFi-R3L-srv>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <YuunCO2lsLDWTGw+@MiWiFi-R3L-srv>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17 (2007-11-01)
Precedence: bulk

On Thu, Aug 04, 2022 at 07:01:28PM +0800, Baoquan He wrote:
> After attempts, I realize it's time to let one zone DMA or DMA32 cover
> the whole low 4G memory on x86_64. That's the real fix. The tiny 16M DMA
> on 64bit system is root cause.

We can't for two reasons:

 - people still use ISA cards on x86, including the industrial PC104
   version, and we still have drivers that rely on it
 - we still have PCI and PCIe devices with small than 26, 28, 30 and 31
   bit addressing limitations

We could try to get the 24-bit DMA entirely out of the zone allocator
and only fill a genpool at bootmem time.  But that requires fixing up
all the direct users of page and slab allocations on it first (of
which 90+% look bogus, with the s390 drivers being the obvious
exception).

Or we could make 'low' memory a special ZONE_MOVABLE and have an
allocator that can search by physical address an replace ZONE_DMA
and ZONE_DMA32 with that.  Which sounds like a nice idea to me, but
is pretty invasive.