Re: MTRR control
Brian Gerst (bgerst@quark.vpplus.com)
Sat, 13 Dec 1997 21:57:40 -0500
Richard Gooch wrote:
>
> [SORRY: MY MOUSE FOULED UP AND I SENT THAT LAST MESSAGE UNCOMPLETED]
> Alan Cox writes:
> > > Another problem with proform-1.0 is that it states that it doesn't
> > > work with SMP. Why is this so? Is it simply because the MTRRs of the
> > > CPU which happened to run insmod are modified, but not those of the
> >
> > Yep
> >
> > > other CPU(s)? In that case all that is needed is some mechanism to run
> > > this bit of code for all CPUs.
> >
> > Thats all there is too it. The x86 SMP code has some message passing it
> > uses for sending certain inter CPU events, adding a "sync mtrr" message
> > should do the trick.
>
> OK, I'll have a look at that. Another question: I've been looking at
> the sysctl interface, and I'm not so sure that it is really what I
> want to use. It seems to be more tuned to fiddling kernel parameters
> rather than hardware registers. So I'm thinking of simply adding a R/W
> entry like /proc/mtrr which would yield something like:
>
> reg00: base=0x00000000 ( 0MB), range= 128MB: write-back
> reg01: base=0xf8000000 (3968MB), range= 4MB: write-combining
>
> when reading and would require you to write the following to create an
> entry:
> 0xf8000000 0x400000 write-combining
>
> and the following to remove an entry:
> 0xf8000000 0x400000 remove
>
> and /proc/mtrr would only exist on a PPro. Does this scheme sound
> reasonable (read: clean enough)?
This could probably be extended to the Cyrix 6x86[MX] processor's ARR
registers which seem to do a similar function.
--
Brian Gerst