Re: [RFC/PATCH] powerpc: rework 4xx PTE access and TLB miss

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 01:20 -0500, Kumar Gala wrote:
> On Jun 10, 2008, at 7:50 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> 
> > This is some preliminary work to improve TLB management on SW loaded
> > TLB powerpc platforms. This introduce support for non-atomic PTE
> > operations in pgtable-ppc32.h and removes write back to the PTE from
> > the TLB miss handlers. In addition, the DSI interrupt code no longer
> > tries to fixup write permission, this is left to generic code, and
> > _PAGE_HWWRITE is gone.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
> > ---
> >
> > This is a first step, plan is to do the same for FSL BookE, 405 and
> > possibly 8xx too. From there, I want to rework a bit the execute
> > permission handling to avoid multiple faults, add support for
> > _PAGE_EXEC (no executable mappings), for prefaulting (especially
> > for kmap) and proper SMP support for future SMP capable BookE
> > platforms.
> 
> You really should add some comment about what you are doing with the  
> 44x watermark.  As I look at this I'm not clear what that change is  
> about and I'm sure in the future someone looking at this will  
> wondering why this commit changed those bits.
> 
> Otherwise this all looks good (other than my other nit picking comments)

I'll add a comment. Basically, the idea is to replace a load of the
watermark from memory in the fast path, with a cmpli instruction,
that we then "patch" when the watermark changes (which is very rare).

Saves a load and a GPR for use in the TLB miss handler, which allows me
further to avoid a double loading of the PTE bottom half, etc...

Ben.