Re: Missing cache flush.

David Woodhouse
2001-06-05T09:01:25Z

davem@redhat.com said:
> One way to do this, (even portably :-) is via displacement flushes.
> Linus mentioned this.

> Basically if you know the L2 cache size and the assosciativity you can
> do this as long as you can get a "2 * L2 cache size * assosciativity"
> piece of contiguous physical memory. When you need this "simon says"
> flush, you basically read this physical memory span and this will
> guarentee that all dirty data has exited the L2 cache.

Fine. So it should be possible to do it on all architectures with
physically-indexed caches - that's good. Architectures with
virtually-indexed caches are going to have explicit cache management
functionality anyway, presumably :)

Obviously the algorithm you describe should not be implemented in
arch-independent drivers. It should be in include/asm-*, for those
architectures which _can't_ do it with a single cache management instruction
(or loop of same).

What shall we call this function? The intuitive "flush_dcache_range" appears
to have already been taken.

--
dwmw2