I also wrote a patch to enable using more than 256MB of CMA memory (and not require any particular alignment). The 256MB limit was due to a hardware bug: the binner's memory allocations get dereferenced with their top 4 bits set to the top 4 bits of the tile state data array's address. Given that tile state allocations happen after CL setup (while the binner is running and throwing overflow interrupts), there was no way to guarantee that we could find overflow memory with the top bits matching.
The new solution, suggested by someone from the set top box group, is to allocate a single 16MB to 32MB buffer at HW init time, and return all of those types of allocations out of it, since it turns out you don't need much to complete rendering of any given scene. I've been mulling over the details of a solution for a while, and finally wrote and tested the patch I wanted (tricky parts included freeing the memory when the hardware was idle, and how to track the lifetimes of the sub-allocations). Results look good, and I'll be submitting it this week.
However, I spent most of the week on converting the X Server over to meson
Meson is a delightful new build system (based around Ninja on Linux) that massively speeds up builds, while also being portable to Windows (unlike autotools generally). If you've ever tried to build the X stack on Raspberry Pi, you know that autotools is painfully slow. It's also been the limiting factor for me in debugging my scripts for CI for the X Server -- something we'd really like to be doing as we hack on glamor or do refactors in the core.
So far all I've landed in this project is code deletion, as I find build options that aren't hooked up to anything, or code that isn't hooked up to build options. This itself will speed up our builds, and ajax has been working in parallel on deleting a bunch of code that makes the build messier than it needs to be. I've also submitted patches for rendercheck converting to meson (as a demo of what the conversion looks like), and I have Xephyr, Xvfb, Xdmx, and Xwayland building in the X Server with meson.
So far the only stumbling block for the meson conversion of the X Server is the X.org sdksyms.c file. It's the ugliest part of the build -- running the C preprocessor on a generated .c that #includes a bunch of .h tiles, then running the output of that through awk and trying to parse C using regular expressions. This is, as you might guess, somewhat fragile.
My hope for a solution to this is to just quit generating sdksyms.c entirely. Using ELF sections, we can convince the linker to not garbage collect symbols that it thinks are unused. Then we get to just decorate symbols with XORG_EXPORT or XORG_EXPORT_VAR (unfortunately have to have separate sections for RO vs RW contents), and Xorg will have the correct set of symbols exported. I started on a branch for this, ajax got it actually building, and now we just need to bash the prototypes so that the same set of symbols are exported before/after the conversion.