On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 10:15:06AM +0200, Kevin D. Kissell wrote:
> > > > I'm not sure what you mean by TLB translations required for hit
> > > > cacheops. If you mean the Index Writeback or Index Invalidate
> > > > functions, note that you can (and should) use a kseg0 address to
> > > > do this.
> >
> > Mike was proposing a kseg0 address translating to the right physical
> > address, and used with a hit-type cacheop. I believe Ralf (and Linux)
> > are just assuming that's no good because it doesn't work if you have
> > cacheable memory above 512Mbytes physical address.
>
> More importantly, it doesn't work in the case of virtually tagged caches,
> such as those in the SB-1 and MIPS 20K.
On SB1 we just switch to a new ASID which effectivly is a cheap way to
invalidate the entire I-cache. Assuming the other process has at most
4k of code resident in the I-cache from it's previous timeslice this
even is the optimal solution. But this optimization is a heuristic that
hasn't been verified to be optimal for performance.
> > I wonder whether anything really bad would happen if you temporarily
> > changed the (machine) ASID to that of the address space you wanted to
> > invalidate?
>
> I looked at that when we were investigating the aforementioned
> issues with virtually-tagged I-caches. It looked to me as if exceptions
> can occur during the invalidation, and that processing those exceptions
> can cause signals to be raised to the current process in a manner that
> assumes that the TLB and ASID are coherent and in sync with
> the scheduler. It may be that just changing the ASID temporarily
> would work - most of the time. It may even be that, with a bit
> of lashing down of state, disabling of interrupts, setting of flags
> to be read by traps.c/signal.c, etc, etc, it could be made bulletproof.
> But I don't think that the simple, obvious hack is safe.
Yep - it seems like a can of worms sufficiently large to be left closed
for 2.4 ...
Ralf
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