On Mon, May 13, 2024 at 11:06:24AM -0400, Nicolas Dufresne wrote:

Le lundi 13 mai 2024 à 15:51 +0200, Maxime Ripard a écrit :

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On Mon, May 13, 2024 at 09:42:00AM -0400, Nicolas Dufresne wrote:

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Le lundi 13 mai 2024 à 10:29 +0200, Maxime Ripard a écrit :

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On Wed, May 08, 2024 at 10:36:08AM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:

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On Tue, May 07, 2024 at 04:07:39PM -0400, Nicolas Dufresne wrote:

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Le mardi 07 mai 2024 à 21:36 +0300, Laurent Pinchart a écrit : > Shorter term, we have a problem to solve, and the best option we have > found so far is to rely on dma-buf heaps as a backend for the frame > buffer allocatro helper in libcamera for the use case described above. > This won't work in 100% of the cases, clearly. It's a stop-gap measure > until we can do better.

Considering the security concerned raised on this thread with dmabuf heap allocation not be restricted by quotas, you'd get what you want quickly with memfd + udmabuf instead (which is accounted already).

It was raised that distro don't enable udmabuf, but as stated there by Hans, in any cases distro needs to take action to make the softISP works. This alternative is easy and does not interfere in anyway with your future plan or the libcamera API. You could even have both dmabuf heap (for Raspbian) and the safer memfd+udmabuf for the distro with security concerns.

And for the long term plan, we can certainly get closer by fixing that issue with accounting. This issue also applied to v4l2 io-ops, so it would be nice to find common set of helpers to fix these exporters.

Yeah if this is just for softisp, then memfd + udmabuf is also what I was about to suggest. Not just as a stopgap, but as the real official thing.

udmabuf does kinda allow you to pin memory, but we can easily fix that by adding the right accounting and then either let mlock rlimits or cgroups kernel memory limits enforce good behavior.

I think the main drawback with memfd is that it'll be broken for devices without an IOMMU, and while you said that it's uncommon for GPUs, it's definitely not for codecs and display engines.

In the context of libcamera, the allocation and the alignment done to the video frame is done completely blindly. In that context, there is a lot more then just the allocation type that can go wrong and will lead to a memory copy. The upside of memfd, is that the read cache will help speeding up the copies if they are needed.

dma-heaps provide cacheable buffers too...

Yes, and why we have cache hints in V4L2 now. There is no clue that softISP code can read to make the right call. The required cache management in undefined until all the importer are known. I also don't think heaps currently care to adapt the dmabuf sync behaviour based on the different importers, or the addition of a new importer. On top of which, there is insufficient information on the device to really deduce what is needed.

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Another important point is that this is only used if the application haven't provided frames. If your embedded application is non-generic, and you have permissions to access the right heap, the application can solve your specific issue. But in the generic Linux space, Linux kernel API are just insufficient for the "just work" scenario.

... but they also provide semantics around the memory buffers that no other allocation API do. There's at least the mediatek secure playback series and another one that I've started to work on to allocate ECC protected or unprotected buffers that are just the right use case for the heaps, and the target frameworks aren't.

Let's agree we are both off topic now. The libcamera softISP is currently purely software, and cannot write to any form of protected memory. As for ECC, I would hope this usage will be coded in the application and that this application has been authorized to access the appropriate heaps.

And finally, none of this fixes the issue that the heap allocation are not being accounted properly and allow of an easy memory DoS. So uaccess should be granted with care, meaning that defaulting a "desktop" library to that, means it will most of the time not work at all.

I think that issue should be fixed, regardless of whether or not we end up using dma heaps for libcamera. If we do use them, maybe there will be a higher incentive for somebody involved in this conversation to tackle that problem first :-) And maybe, as a result, the rest of the Linux community will consider with a more open mind usage of dma heaps on desktop systems.