On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 11:05:43PM -0700, David Miller wrote: > From: Nick Piggin <npiggin@xxxxxxx> > Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:03:40 +0200 > > > Hardware walkers, I shouldn't worry too much about, except as a thought > > exercise to realise that we have lockless readers. I think(?) alpha can > > walk the linux ptes in hardware on TLB miss, but surely they will have > > to do the requisite barriers in hardware too (otherwise things get > > really messy) > > My understanding is that all Alpha implementations walk the > page tables in PAL code. Ah OK. I guess that's effectively "hardware" as far as Linux is concerned. I guess even x86 really walks the page tables in microcode as well. Basically I just mean something that is invisible to, and obvlivious of, Linux's locking. > > Powerpc's find_linux_pte is one of the software walked lockless ones. > > That's basically how I imagine hardware walkers essentially should operate. > > Sparc64 walks the page tables lockless in it's TLB hash table miss > handling. > > MIPS does something similar. Interesting, thanks. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
