From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752278Ab0GWHXw (ORCPT ); Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:23:52 -0400 Received: from mx2.mail.elte.hu ([157.181.151.9]:54995 "EHLO mx2.mail.elte.hu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752065Ab0GWHXu (ORCPT ); Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:23:50 -0400 Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:23:01 +0200 From: Ingo Molnar To: ykzhao Cc: Jack Steiner , "tglx@linutronix.de" , "lenb@kernel.org" , "linux-acpi@vger.kernel.org" , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , "H. Peter Anvin" , Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [RFC] - Mapping ACPI tables as CACHED Message-ID: <20100723072301.GC23461@elte.hu> References: <20100722152220.GA18290@sgi.com> <1279849573.13929.28.camel@localhost.localdomain> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1279849573.13929.28.camel@localhost.localdomain> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-08-17) X-ELTE-SpamScore: 1.0 X-ELTE-SpamLevel: s X-ELTE-SpamCheck: no X-ELTE-SpamVersion: ELTE 2.0 X-ELTE-SpamCheck-Details: score=1.0 required=5.9 tests=BAYES_50 autolearn=no SpamAssassin version=3.2.5 1.0 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 40 to 60% [score: 0.4665] Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org * ykzhao wrote: > From the above description maybe the E820_ACPI region can be mapped as > cached. But this still depends on the BIOS. If the some shared data resides > in the E820_ACPI region on some BIOS, maybe we can't map the E820_ACPI > region as cached again. I dont think we can do this safely unless some other OS (Windows) does it as well. (the reason is that if some BIOS messes this up then it will cause nasty bugs/problems only on Linux.) But the benefits of caching are very clear and well measured by Jack, so we want the feature. What we can do is to add an exception for 'known good' hw vendors - i.e. something quite close to Jack's RFC patch, but implemented a bit more cleanly: Exposing x86_platform and e820 details to generic ACPI code isnt particularly clean - there should be an ACPI accessor function for that or so: a new acpi_table_can_be_cached(table) function or so. In fact since __acpi_map_table(addr,size) is defined by architectures already, this could be done purely within x86 code. Thanks, Ingo