Re: [v2.6.26] what's brewing in x86.git for v2.6.26

[Suresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@intel.com>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 01:37:30PM -0700, Roland Dreier wrote:
>  >  - PAT support - first step towards phasing out MTRR's for cache 
>  >    attribute control
> 
> I just grabbed your tree and I see that there is no
> pgprot_writecombine() for x86.  I see that pci_mmap_page_range() handles
> write combining but there's no way for a PCI driver to allow userspace
> to mmap() part of a BAR with WC enabled.  Doing this gives a big
> performance boost for running low-latency apps on InfiniBand hardware
> driven by the mlx4 driver (look for the FIXME about it in
> drivers/infiniband/hw/mlx4/main.c).  Are there any plans to handle this
> somehow?

Yes. We are planning to fix this by tracking the attribute usage specified
in the pgprot field of remap_pfn_range(). Once the attribute is tracked
properly, we can add pgprot_writecombine() for WC case.

This should also help the other drivers like video fb etc which specify
the UC/WC attribute for user level mmap.

thanks,
suresh