Re: MTRR use in drivers

From: Brice Goglin
Date: Sun Jun 23 2013 - 02:45:19 EST


Le 21/06/2013 07:00, H. Peter Anvin a écrit :
> An awful lot of drivers, mostly DRI drivers, are still mucking with
> MTRRs directly as opposed to using ioremap_wc() or similar interfaces.
> In addition to the architecture dependency, this is really undesirable
> because MTRRs are a limited resource, whereas page table attributes are not.
>
> Furthermore, this perpetuates the need for the horrific hack known as
> "MTRR cleanup".
>
> What, if anything, can we do to clean up this mess?
>
> -hpa
>

The first network driver that used ioremap_wc() back in 2008 (myri10ge)
had to keep using MTRR because ioremap_wc() silently falls back to
ioremap_nocache() when PAT is disabled.

I asked about this in https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/5/31/42 and there was
some talk about putting the MTRR addition in the nocache fallback path
but I guess nobody implemented the idea.

Brice

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