Re: [PATCH 5/7] [RFC] force 32-byte aligned kmallocs

From: Eric Van Hensbergen
Date: Thu May 19 2011 - 20:48:00 EST


On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 7:36 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt
<benh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 16:24 -0500, Eric Van Hensbergen wrote:
>>
>> -#ifdef CONFIG_NOT_COHERENT_CACHE
>> +#if defined(CONFIG_NOT_COHERENT_CACHE) || defined(CONFIG_BGP)
>>  #define ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN    L1_CACHE_BYTES
>>  #endif
>
> Is DMA cache coherent on BG/P ? That's odd for a 4xx base :-)
>

My understanding of things (which could be totally wrong) is that the
DMA we care about on BG/P (namely the Torus and Collective networks)
is coherent at the L2. Of course the change in question is talking
about L1_CACHE_BYTES, so my reading of this is that its a sleazy way
of getting aligned mallocs that make interactions with the tightly
coupled networks easier/more-efficient. I'm open to alternative
suggestions.

-eric
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/