[RFC simple allocator v2 1/2] Create Simple Allocator module

[Daniel Vetter]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 12:15:26PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 09:59:55PM +0200, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Tuesday 14 Feb 2017 20:44:44 Daniel Vetter wrote:
> 
> > > ADF was probably the best example in this. KMS also took a while until all
> > > the fbdev wheels have been properly reinvented (some are still the same old
> > > squeaky onces as fbdev had, e.g. fbcon).
> 
> > > And I don't think destaging ION is going to be hard, just a bit of
> > > work (could be a nice gsoc or whatever).
> 
> > Oh, technically speaking, it would be pretty simple. The main issue is to 
> > decide whether we want to commit to the existing ION API. I don't :-)
> 
> Right, we need to figure out what people should be doing and let them
> work on it.  At the minute anyone who wants to use this stuff in
> mainline is kind of stuck as attempts to add ION drivers get pushback
> 
>    https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/11/7/806
> 
> but so do attempts to do something different (there was a statement in
> that thread that new ION drivers could be added if we could ever figure
> out bindings but I'm not sure there's any prospect of that).  There's no
> clear direction for people to follow if they want to make progress.

Hm, this feels like a misunderstanding ... the unix device memory
allocator discussion is all about how to solve the userspace side on a
generic system (i.e. when you can't just hardcode everything in gralloc).
It's not really about where to actually allocate the kernel memory, for
that I think ION still looks as reasonable as anything else.

We just need to get around to working down the destaging todo items and
push it into something like drivers/gpu/ion or whatever. Feel free to cc
me and Laura and dri-devel on any such effort, this has been stuck way too
long.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch