Re: Fw: [PATCH] ia64: race flushing icache in do_no_page path

[Nick Piggin]

Rohit Seth wrote:
> Hi Nick, 
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Piggin [mailto:nickpiggin@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 11:03 PM
> To: Hugh Dickins
> Cc: rohitseth@xxxxxxxxxx; Mike Stroyan; Andrew Morton; Luck, Tony;
> linux-ia64@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Fw: [PATCH] ia64: race flushing icache in do_no_page path
>
> Hugh Dickins wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:
> >
> >
> > > OIC, you need a virtual address to evict the icache, so you can't 
> > > flush at flush_dcache time? Or does ia64 have an instruction to flush 
> > > the whole icache? (it would be worth testing, to see how much 
> > > performance suffers).
> >
> >
> > I'm puzzled by that remark: the ia64 flush_icache_range always has a 
> > virtual address, it uses the kernel virtual address; it takes no 
> > interest in whether there's a user virtual address.
>
>
> > I _think_ what it is doing is actually flushing dcache lines dirtied 
> > via the kernel virtual address (yes, I think flush_icache
> > in lazy_mmu_prot_update is actually just flushing the dcache, but 
> > I could be wrong? [*]).
>
>
> It is invalidating any entries (containing same physical address) in both I
> and D caches.  Any dirty lines in D cache are written back to memory before
> getting invalidated (ofcourse).

OK. (should it be issuing both fc and fc.i to be robust in case a
new implementation doesn't flush the dcache with fc.i?)


> > There are supposedly no icache lines at that point[**]:
>
>
> For this bug to trigger there has to be a (stale) entry in icache containing
> the old contents of a page that just got updated by kernel as explicit
> copying of data (DMAs are coherent on ia64, meaning if a device were to
> write to memory then architecture guarnatees that both I and D caches are
> invalidated).

So if we have a dirty dcache line for a given physical address,
it will _always_ be the case that a subsequent icache load will
find that dirty data?

... thanks for bearing with me ;)

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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