Re: Fw: [PATCH] ia64: race flushing icache in do_no_page path

Nick Piggin
2007-05-01T11:43:29Z

Rohit Seth wrote:
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hugh Dickins [mailto:hugh@veritas.com]
> Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 10:20 PM
> To: Nick Piggin
> Cc: rohitseth@google.com; Mike Stroyan; Andrew Morton; Luck, Tony;
> linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: Fw: [PATCH] ia64: race flushing icache in do_no_page path
>
> On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
>>OIC, you need a virtual address to evict the icache, so you can't
>>flush at flush_dcache time? Or does ia64 have an instruction to flush
>>the whole icache? (it would be worth testing, to see how much
>>performance suffers).
>
>
> IIRC, there is a PAL call to flush the whole cache (but that is quite a
> heavy call). Though you really don't need to be doing this.
>
>
>>I'm puzzled by that remark: the ia64 flush_icache_range always has a
>>virtual address, it uses the kernel virtual address; it takes
>>no interest in whether there's a user virtual address.
>
>
> Caches on Itanium are physical. So, it doesn't matter what virtual address
> you use to flush a cache line, cache line containing specific physical
> memory will be flushed.

Really? I was under the vague impression that L1 i/d caches were virtual
and required this flushing... but I guess so long as the ISA says that
fc/fc.i flushes all caches corresponding to the physical address of the
provided virtual address, then that's what matters.

> For the cases where you have virtual caches,
> update_mmu_cache is the API to use.

But it happens after the pte is installed.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.