My prejudices are showing but...
o Shouldn't the kernel should have a zero-tolerance policy towards cache
aliases? That is, no D-cache alias should ever be permitted to
happen, not even in data you reasonably hope might be read-only?
Aliases only appeared by a kind of mistake when the R4000 was
opportunistically repackaged without the secondary cache (the L2
cache tags used to keep track of the virtually-indexed L1s, and you
got an exception if you created an L1-alias).
They really aren't a feature to be tolerated in the hope you can
clean up before disaster strikes.
o And I could never get my brains round cache maintenance if I used
the same word ("flush") both for invalidate and write-back.
--
Dominic Sweetman
MIPS Technologies.
