David,
I'm battling this now. Our mips 24k has a virtually indexed cache.
We're definitely seeing issues where the cache hasn't been flushed
for highmem pages. I thought I had this fixed, but I'm still seeing
some problems.
Jon
On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 09:24 +0100, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 06, 2008 at 07:09:57PM -0700, David VomLehn wrote:
>
> > On the MIPS processor, cache flushing is done based on virtual addresses.
> > However, in the Linux kernel, there are a lot of places where memory is
> > mapped with kmap or kmap_atomic, then unmapped with the corresponding
> > kunmap or kunmap_atomic and only *then* is the cache flushed. In other
> > words, we only flush the cache after we have dropped the mapping of
> > memory into a virtual address. I think this is generally wrong.
> >
> > This may really only affect those of us who have enabled high memory, but
> > it's pretty prevalent in kernel code. We noted this before, but have
> > apparently just been bitten by it. Is it just me or is there a fairly
> > widespread problem for processors that flush the cache using virtual
> > addresses?
>
> Not all MIPS processors have virtually indexed caches; some have physically
> indexed caches or caches which behave effectivly like physically indexed
> and MIPS highmem only tries to support the latter kinds of caches. Which
> means most of the cache flushes turn into nops anyway.
>
> Ralf
>
>
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