Re: [Linaro-mm-sig] [PATCH 6/8] drivers: add Contiguous MemoryAllocator

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Wed, 6 Jul 2011, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

> On Wednesday 06 July 2011 21:10:07 Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > If you get a highmem page, because the cache is VIPT, that page might 
> > still be cached even if it wasn't mapped.  With a VIVT cache we must 
> > flush the cache whenever a highmem page is unmapped.  There is no such 
> > restriction with VIPT i.e. ARMv6 and above.  Therefore to make sure the 
> > highmem page you get doesn't have cache lines associated to it, you must 
> > first map it cacheable, then perform cache invalidation on it, and 
> > eventually remap it as non-cacheable.  This is necessary because there 
> > is no way to perform cache maintenance on L1 cache using physical 
> > addresses unfortunately.  See commit 7e5a69e83b for an example of what 
> > this entails (fortunately commit 3e4d3af501 made things much easier and 
> > therefore commit 39af22a79 greatly simplified things).
> 
> Ok, thanks for the explanation. This definitely makes the highmem approach
> much harder to get right, and slower. Let's hope then that Marek's approach
> of using small pages for the contiguous memory region and changing their
> attributes on the fly works out better than this.

I would say that both approaches have fairly equivalent complexity.


Nicolas
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