On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 02:35:21AM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> This probe is necessary, because for a VIVT I-cache, code from there may
> be executed even if there is no mapping stored for the virtual address of
> the instruction in the TLB anymore. However this trap handler wants to
> read the instruction word from the memory and obviously this goes through
> the D-cache which is not virtually tagged. As such a TLB refill exception
> would happen if the mapping was indeed absent.
>
> However, please note that this piece of code runs at the exception level
> and therefore such a scenario would qualify as a nested exception. Which
> means the general exception vector would be used and the TLBL or TLBS
> handler invoked as appropriate. Neither of which are currently prepared
> to do a refill. Changing that would be rather trivial as it boils down to
> checking the value of cp0.index.p and executiong TLBWR rather than TLBWI
> as usual, but that is in the fast path, so we do not want to waste cycles
> for such a corner case as RDHWR emulation.
To clarify, this behaviour of hitting in an VIVT I-cache even though there
is no address translation in the TLB is allowed but not required by the
the MIPS architecture spec. From a software perspective it's a bit
quirky but it allows faster pipeline implementations. The currently
supported VIVT I-cache processors are the SB1, 20K and 25K. The SB1
has this behaviour; of the 20K and 25K I don't know.
Ralf
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