Re: FPU emulator unsafe for SMP?

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@oss.sgi.com>]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 03:46:32PM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:

> > The context register is actually intended to be used for indexing a flat
> > 4mb array of pagetables on a 32-bit processor.  It's a bit ill-defined
> > on R4000-class processors as it assumes a size of 8 bytes per pte, so
> > cannot be used in the Linux/MIPS kernel without shifting bits around.
> 
>  Ill???  I think someone was just longsighted enough not to limit PTEs to
> 38-bit physical addresses.  A shift costs a single cycle if we want to
> save memory. 

The idea of the register was to directly generate the address of a PTE.
An extra instruction in TLB exception handlers isn't only visible in
performance, it also means introducing constraints on the address itself -
an arithmetic shift by one bit for 4 byte PTEs will result in the two
high bits of the address being identical, an arithmetic shift will make
the high bit a null etc.  Just on 32-bit kernels on 64-bit hw you're
lucky, you have a bit 32 in c0_context which will be shifted into bit 31.

Messy?

  Ralf