Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: USB mass storage and ARM cache coherency | From | Catalin Marinas <> | Date | Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:51:16 +0000 |
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Hi,
On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 06:55 +0000, Pavel Machek wrote: > > > So, let's put this in the HCD drivers and be done with it. > > > > The patch below is what fixes the I-D cache incoherency issues on ARM. I > > don't particularly like the solution but it seems to be the only one > > available. > > Really? It looks like arm should just flush the caches when mapping > executable page to the userspace.... you can't expect all the drivers > to be modified like that...
We could of course flush the caches every time we get a page fault but that's far from optimal, especially since DMA-capable drivers to do not pollute the D-cache and don't need this extra flushing. Note that the recent ARM processors have PIPT caches but separate for I and D and it's the PIO drivers that pollute the D-cache.
The kernel API provides flush_dcache_page() to be called every time the kernel writes to a page cache page. This is further optimised for working in pair with update_mmu_cache() to delay the flushing until the actual page is mapped into user space and this latter function is called (which in general is not a cache maintenance function).
The problem with some PIO drivers and a filesystems like ext2 is that there is no call to flush_dcache_page() when getting data into a page cache page. Since the page isn't marked as dirty (PG_arch_1), a subsequent call to update_mmu_cache() as a result of a page fault doesn't flush the caches.
There is a flush_icache_page() function called from __do_fault(), however, Documentation/cachetlb.txt states that all the functionality of this function can be implemented in flush_dcache_page() and update_mmu_cache(), hence this function is a no-op.
Please suggest a better solution that does not involve modifying generic Linux code.
> Plus it does unneccessary flushes on x86, etc...
On x86, it should indeed be conditionally compiled based on ARCH_IMPLEMENTS_FLUSH_DCACHE_PAGE.
Regards.
-- Catalin
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