Re: pud_bad vs pud_bad

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Thu Feb 05 2009 - 16:05:51 EST


Hugh Dickins wrote:
Hardware doesn't allow it. It will explode (well, trap) if you set anything
other than P in the top level.

Oh, interesting, I'd never realized that.

There are some later extensions to reuse some of the bits for things like tlb reload policy (I think; I'd have to check to be sure), so they're fairly non-pte-like.

By the by, what are the chances we'll be able to deprecate non-PAE 32-bit?

I sincerely hope 0! I shed no tears at losing support for NUMAQ,
but why should we be forced to double all the 32-bit ptes? You want
us all to be using NX? Or you just want to cut your test/edit matrix -
that I can well understand!

Yes, that's the gist of it. We could simplify things by having only one pte format and only have to parameterise with 3/4 level pagetables. We'd lose support for non-PAE cpus, including the first Pentium M (which is probably still in fairly wide use, unfortunately).

J
--
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/