Re: [PATCH 7/8] membarrier: Remove arm (32) support for SYNC_CORE

Catalin Marinas
2021-06-16T16:02:45Z

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 04:45:29PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 04:23:26PM +0100, Russell King wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 04:04:56PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > The simpler fix for flush_icache_range() is to disable preemption, read
> > > a word in a cacheline to force any dirty lines on another CPU to be
> > > evicted and then issue the D-cache maintenance (for those cache lines
> > > which are still dirty on the current CPU).
> >
> > Is just reading sufficient? If so, why do we do a read-then-write in
> > the MPCore DMA cache ops? Don't we need the write to force exclusive
> > ownership? If we don't have exclusive ownership of the dirty line,
> > how can we be sure to write it out of the caches?
>
> For cleaning (which is the case for I/D coherency), we only need reading
> since we are fine with clean lines being left in the D-cache on other
> CPUs. For invalidation, we indeed need to force the exclusive ownership,
> hence the write.

Ah, I'm not sure the I-cache is broadcast in hardware on ARM11MPCore
either. So fixing the D side won't be sufficient.

--
Catalin