On 29 May 2002, Justin Carlson wrote: > Are the general semantics of the thing just broken, then? We already > ignore the arguments to sys_cacheflush; would redefining the syscall to > mean "flush the caches in such a way that I won't get stale instructions > from this address range" actually break any current programs? > (Evidently not, if several ports are already doing it that way)... You mean removing the DCACHE operation? The overlying _flush_cache() library function is specified by the MIPS ABI supplement, so we shouldn't really redefine it. Also a reasonable use for it may exist -- a userland program touching hardware directly (say X11) may want to use cached accesses for performance reasons (e.g. because cache can do prefetches on reads). I guess the intent for the ICACHE operation is to assure ICACHE vs DCACHE coherency and the intent for the DCACHE operation is to assure DCACHE vs RAM coherency. If the operations do not work in this way for a given backend, then there is a bug in it. > More to the point, does __flush_cache_all() serve any useful purpose at > all, or can it just be replaced with appropriate invocations of > flush_icache_range()? Other than internal use for the individual port > cache routines, it's *only* used in the syscalls and the gdb stub. It does serve a useful purpose. Or at least it should. This reminds me of adding flushing of WB caches at a system shutdown. The function should remain at least for this purpose. If there are places you are absolutely sure flush_icache_range() would suffice, feel free to replace the call. There are not many __flush_cache_all() invocations. > I'd like to hear the rationale for __flush_cache_all() from the original > author; it appears to have shown up in CVS a little more than a year > ago, but I don't know who sent the patch to Ralf. Ralf, do you > remember? I converted a few flush_cache_all() invocations to __flush_cache_all() where appropriate late last year, but the function is a bit older. I think you might dig the linux-kernel list archives for a discussion on the semantics of flush_cache_all() (it's a nop for many MIPS CPUs) and friends. The short description in Documentation/cachetlb.txt is a bit insufficient, I'm afraid. Maciej -- + Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland + +--------------------------------------------------------------+ + e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +
