Anyone noticed that there are a lot of cache flushes after kunmap/kunmap_atomic is called?

[David VomLehn <dvomlehn@cisco.com>]

On the MIPS processor, cache flushing is done based on virtual addresses. 
However, in the Linux kernel, there are a lot of places where memory is mapped 
with kmap or kmap_atomic, then unmapped with the corresponding kunmap or 
kunmap_atomic and only *then* is the cache flushed. In other words, we only flush 
the cache after we have dropped the mapping of memory into a virtual address. I 
think this is generally wrong.

This may really only affect those of us who have enabled high memory, but it's 
pretty prevalent in kernel code. We noted this before, but have apparently just 
been bitten by it. Is it just me or is there a fairly widespread problem for 
processors that flush the cache using virtual addresses?




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