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authorStephen Boyd <stephen.boyd@linaro.org>2016-08-02 14:04:28 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2016-08-02 19:35:10 -0400
commita098ecd2fa7db8fa4fcc178a43627b29b226edb9 (patch)
tree55c25372dd873c23f00fe32744451cdf49f78f78 /include
parent0e742e927571946e08e877d3629e6efd4891ed95 (diff)
downloadlwn-a098ecd2fa7db8fa4fcc178a43627b29b226edb9.tar.gz
lwn-a098ecd2fa7db8fa4fcc178a43627b29b226edb9.zip
firmware: support loading into a pre-allocated buffer
Some systems are memory constrained but they need to load very large firmwares. The firmware subsystem allows drivers to request this firmware be loaded from the filesystem, but this requires that the entire firmware be loaded into kernel memory first before it's provided to the driver. This can lead to a situation where we map the firmware twice, once to load the firmware into kernel memory and once to copy the firmware into the final resting place. This creates needless memory pressure and delays loading because we have to copy from kernel memory to somewhere else. Let's add a request_firmware_into_buf() API that allows drivers to request firmware be loaded directly into a pre-allocated buffer. This skips the intermediate step of allocating a buffer in kernel memory to hold the firmware image while it's read from the filesystem. It also requires that drivers know how much memory they'll require before requesting the firmware and negates any benefits of firmware caching because the firmware layer doesn't manage the buffer lifetime. For a 16MB buffer, about half the time is spent performing a memcpy from the buffer to the final resting place. I see loading times go from 0.081171 seconds to 0.047696 seconds after applying this patch. Plus the vmalloc pressure is reduced. This is based on a patch from Vikram Mulukutla on codeaurora.org: https://www.codeaurora.org/cgit/quic/la/kernel/msm-3.18/commit/drivers/base/firmware_class.c?h=rel/msm-3.18&id=0a328c5f6cd999f5c591f172216835636f39bcb5 Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160607164741.31849-4-stephen.boyd@linaro.org Signed-off-by: Stephen Boyd <stephen.boyd@linaro.org> Cc: Mimi Zohar <zohar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Vikram Mulukutla <markivx@codeaurora.org> Cc: Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org> Cc: Ming Lei <ming.lei@canonical.com> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'include')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/firmware.h8
-rw-r--r--include/linux/fs.h1
2 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/firmware.h b/include/linux/firmware.h
index 5c41c5e75b5c..b1f9f0ccb8ac 100644
--- a/include/linux/firmware.h
+++ b/include/linux/firmware.h
@@ -47,6 +47,8 @@ int request_firmware_nowait(
void (*cont)(const struct firmware *fw, void *context));
int request_firmware_direct(const struct firmware **fw, const char *name,
struct device *device);
+int request_firmware_into_buf(const struct firmware **firmware_p,
+ const char *name, struct device *device, void *buf, size_t size);
void release_firmware(const struct firmware *fw);
#else
@@ -75,5 +77,11 @@ static inline int request_firmware_direct(const struct firmware **fw,
return -EINVAL;
}
+static inline int request_firmware_into_buf(const struct firmware **firmware_p,
+ const char *name, struct device *device, void *buf, size_t size)
+{
+ return -EINVAL;
+}
+
#endif
#endif
diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index 577365a77b47..f3f0b4c8e8ac 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -2652,6 +2652,7 @@ extern int do_pipe_flags(int *, int);
#define __kernel_read_file_id(id) \
id(UNKNOWN, unknown) \
id(FIRMWARE, firmware) \
+ id(FIRMWARE_PREALLOC_BUFFER, firmware) \
id(MODULE, kernel-module) \
id(KEXEC_IMAGE, kexec-image) \
id(KEXEC_INITRAMFS, kexec-initramfs) \