On Mon, 18 Oct 2010, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> The design of the R4000 c0_context / c0_xcontext register assumes 8 byte
> ptes and a flat page table array.
As I say you can increase the size by left-shifting the register.
That's still cheaper than left-shifting and adding a 32-bit of worse yet a
64-bit base. Of course that implies higher yet an alignment and the PTE
size of a power of two (which assuming at least a minimal level of sanity
you want anyway).
A flat structure is quite limiting (read: memory-greedy) indeed, but it
looks to me with clever masking and shifting you should be able to get
two-level page tables quite cheaply and easily too (on 32-bit). Hmm...
> You can map the pagetables into virtual memory to get that and in fact
> very old Linux/MIPS versions did that but that approach may result in
> aliases on some processors so I eventually dropped it. The
> implementation requires nested TLB refill implementations and
> (Linux/MIPS was still using a.out in this days) I implemented a new
> relocation type to squeeze a cycle out of the slow path.
Nested refills shouldn't be too much of a problem, but cache aliases
always ask for troubles, hmm... It may be worth investigating on
processors with no aliases first, if at all.
Maciej
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