From: David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:05:24 -0700 (PDT) > I'll have to figure out how the writeable bits get lost > in the call chain. Actually, I digged further, things seem correct. Initially we only set the SW-writable bit, and this is the right thing to do for a MAP_SHARED writable mapping. If the process actually tries to write to the mapping, the page fault path will set the two bits that actually enable writes, namely the HW-writable bit and the SW-dirty bit. This occurs when pte_mkdirty() is called on the PTE during the execution of mm/memory.c:handle_pte_fault(), right here: if (write_access) { if (!pte_write(entry)) return do_wp_page(mm, vma, address, pte, pmd, ptl, entry); entry = pte_mkdirty(entry); } pte_write() will return true, since the SW-writable bit is set. So we don't should not invoke do_wp_page(), and we'll just set the dirty bit on the existing PTE. For some reason that isn't happening properly, or something keeps clearing the HW-writable bit on us. Another possibility is that one of these operations sets the cacheable bits, or clears the side-effect bit, either of which would cause corruption or other problems when accessing the ATI card through such a mapping. I wonder why.... I'll try to run some experiments on my system to try and get to the bottom of this. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe sparclinux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html