[PATCH v2] staging: android: ion: Allocate from heap ID directly without mask

[Brian Starkey]

Hi John,

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 09:38:29AM -0800, John Stultz wrote:
> 
[snip]

> Some thoughts, as this ABI break has the potential to be pretty painful.
> 
> 1) Unfortunately, this ABI is exposed *through* libion via
> ion_alloc/ion_alloc_fd out to gralloc implementations. Which means it
> will have a wider impact to vendor userland code.

I figured libion could fairly easily loop through all the set bits in
heap_mask and call the ioctl for each until it succeeds. That
preserves the old behaviour from the libion clients' perspective.

> 
> 2) For patches that cause ABI breaks, it might be good to make it
> clear in the commit what the userland impact looks like in userspace,
> possibly with an example, so the poor folks who bisect down the change
> as breaking their system in a year or so have a clear example as to
> what they need to change in their code.
> 
> 3) Also, its not clear how a given userland should distinguish between
> the different ABIs.  We already have logic in libion to distinguish
> between pre-4.12 legacy and post-4.12 implementations (using implicit
> ion_free() behavior). I don't see any such check we can make with this
> code. Adding another ABI version may require we provide an actual
> interface version ioctl.
> 

A slightly fragile/ugly approach might be to attempt a small
allocation with a heap_mask of 0xffffffff. On an "old" implementation,
you'd expect that to succeed, whereas it would/could be made to fail
in the "new" one.

Thanks,
-Brian

> 
> thanks
> -john