Re: __flush_cache_all() miscellany

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

On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 09:50:52AM -0700, Justin Carlson wrote:

> Looking at the cache routines, I've noticed that there's been a
> relatively recent introduction of a __flush_cache_all() routine. 
> Looking at oss.sgi.com's cvs logs, I see this comment:
> 
> >Introduce __flush_cache_all() which flushes the cache no matter if
> >this operation is necessary from the mm point of view or not.
> 
> Some questions:
> 
> Which caches does this apply to?  It looks like the current
> implementations assume L1 only.

The operation got introduced for the R10000 where we only need to flush
the caches during initialization or the (unlikely on Origin) case of

> Would anyone have a problem with renaming this function?  To me, at
> least, it's rather confusing to have all of:

No.  You may have noticed that I already introduced a bunch of local_*()
functions for the TLB stuff for the same reason - the old functions had
poor names.  The common Linux conventions to use extra underscores for a
more basic version of a function (like get_user vs __get_user etc.) is
frequently not expressive enough.

> flush_cache_all()
> _flush_cache_all()
> __flush_cache_all()
> ___flush_cache_all()

Odd number of underscores means it's a pointer ;)

> defined, especially when the latter two mean something significantly
> different from the former two.  I'd prefer calling the new one
> {_}force_flush_l1_caches() or somesuch.

Ok.

> In a related note, one of the few places this routine is called is the
> kgdb stub routines (in arch/mips/kernel/gdb-stub.c):
> 
> void set_async_breakpoint(unsigned int epc)
> {
> 	int cpu = smp_processor_id();
> 
> 	async_bp[cpu].addr = epc;
> 	async_bp[cpu].val  = *(unsigned *)epc;
> 	*(unsigned *)epc = BP;
> 	__flush_cache_all();
> }
> 
> Shouldn't that be a flush_icache_range() call anyways?

Yes.

  Ralf