Re: [PATCH resend 5/9] MIPS: sync after cacheflush

[Kevin Cernekee <cernekee@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Shinya Kuribayashi <skuribay@pobox.com> wrote:
> I suspect that SYNC insn alone is still not enough, insn't it?  In
> such systems with that 'deep' write buffer and data incoherency is
> visibly observed, there sill may be data write transactions floating
> in the internal bus system.
>
> To make sure that all data (data inside processor's write buffer and
> data floating in the internal bus system), we need the following
> three steps:
>
> 1. Flush data cache
> 2. Uncached, dummy load operation from _DRAM_ (not somewhere else)
> 3. then SYNC instruction

Some systems do require additional steps along those lines, e.g.

# ifdef CONFIG_SGI_IP28
#  define fast_iob()                            \
        __asm__ __volatile__(                   \
                ".set   push\n\t"               \
                ".set   noreorder\n\t"          \
                "lw     $0,%0\n\t"              \
                "sync\n\t"                      \
                "lw     $0,%0\n\t"              \
                ".set   pop"                    \
                : /* no output */               \
                : "m" (*(int *)CKSEG1ADDR(0x1fa00004)) \
                : "memory")

Maybe it would be better to use iob() instead of __sync() directly, so
that it is easy to add extra steps for the CPUs that need them.  DEC
and Loongson have custom __wbflush() implementations, and something
similar could be added for your processor to implement the uncached
dummy load.

What do you think?