Re: Rootfs in eMMC: Kernel panic ...Attempted to kill init!

[Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@arm.linux.org.uk>]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 05:44:00PM +0200, Dirk Behme wrote:
> Hi Catalin,
>
> Catalin Marinas wrote:
>> On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 17:46 +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 05:13:16PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
>>>> In my case (ext2 over pata_platform), there is no flush_dcache_page()
>>>> call after the page was written with data from the CompactFlash (neither
>>>> the driver nor the VFS layer do this and we used hardware tracing to
>>>> double-check). When the page is mapped into user space,
>>>> update_mmu_cache() is called but the page hasn't been marked as dirty
>>>> and no D-cache flushing occurs. Calling flush_dcache_page() in
>>>> mpage_end_io_read() works around this issue.
>>> As already covered, there's no chance of adding such a call to the
>>> generic kernel.  It's the responsibility of the drivers to ensure that
>>> data they read in hits the underlying page - in the same way that DMA
>>> does.
>>
>> The patch below appears to solve the problem with CompactFlash using
>> pata_platform (I cc'ed linux-ide since the patch changes their code).
>> The patch only handles the read case but similarly it may need to handle
>> the write case if D-cache aliasing between user and kernel mappings
>> exists.
>>
>> For the USB mass storage, I haven't yet figured out the best place to
>> call flush_dcache_page().
>
> Any news regarding USB mass storage on ARM MPCore? Else this would mean 
> that USB mass storage (USB stick, USB disk) formatted with ext2/3/4 
> wouldn't work with MPCore?

USB normally uses DMA, so should be unaffected by this issue.