Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:57:56 -0800 | From | Jeremy Fitzhardinge <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH RFC] vm_unmap_aliases: allow callers to inhibit TLB flush |
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Nick Piggin wrote: > I have patches to move the tlb flushing to an asynchronous process context... > but all tweaks to that (including flushing at vmap) are just variations on the > existing flushing scheme and don't solve your problem, so I don't think we > really need to change that for the moment (my patches are mainly for latency > improvement and to allow vunmap to be usable from interrupt context). >
Hi Nick,
I'm very interested in being able to call vm_unmap_aliases() from interrupt context. Does the work you mention here encompass that?
For Xen dom0, when someone does something like dma_alloc_coherent, we allocate the memory as normal, and then swizzle the underlying physical pages to be machine physically contiguous (vs contiguous pseudo-physical guest memory), and within the addressable range for the device. In order to do that, we need to make sure the pages are only mapped by the linear mapping, and there are no other aliases.
And since drivers are free to allocate dma memory at interrupt time, this needs to happen at interrupt time too.
(The tlb flush issue that started this read should be a non-issue for Xen, at least, because all cross-cpu tlb flushes should happen via a hypercall rather than kernel-initiated IPIs, so there's no possibility of deadlock. Though I'll happily admit that taking advantage of the implementation properties of a particular implementation is not very pretty...)
Thanks, J
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