On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 10:18:50PM +0800, Fuxin Zhang wrote: > I just run a fresh new 2.4.21 kernel on my board, no luck. The problem > remains. But I notice that my hardware may have some problems, > especially with the add-on ide card. Keep headaching... > > As to the discussion of SYNC, I can't help wondering whether the cache > management should be totally hidden from programmers. People tends to > write "safetest" code because of all kinds of brain-damage different > hardware, which leads to inefficient code. And this will cancel out the > potential speed benefit of simpler hardware. Also today's hardware seems > not as expensive as it was before... Cache managment needs to be somehow hidden from programmers as well as possible - the average programmer has no clue about how caches work. We've come up with an API that hides the actual functioning of caches pretty well for DMA devices, see Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt and in 2.6 also a more generalized version documented in Documentation/DMA-API.txt. Ralf
