Re: USB mass storage and ARM cache coherency

From: Catalin Marinas
Date: Tue Feb 02 2010 - 12:20:36 EST


On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 17:11 +0000, Alan Stern wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Oliver Neukum wrote:
>
> > Am Dienstag, 2. Februar 2010 13:39:35 schrieb Catalin Marinas:
> > > > For storage that is correct. But what about other sources of pages,
> > > > for example iSCSI?
> > >
> > > In the iSCSI case, does the HCD driver write directly to a page cache
> > > page? Or it just fills in network packets that are copied to page cache
> > > pages by the iSCSI code (sorry, I'm not familiar with this part of the
> > > kernel). If the latter, the cache flushing in the HCD driver would not
> > > help and it needs to be done in the iSCSI code.
> >
> > As far as I can tell iSCSI does a private copy. But I don't know how
> > many methods to transfer code pages over USB exist. I'd say the
> > conservative solution is to flush for everything but control transfers.
>
> This doesn't make any sense. Nobody would ever use isochronous
> transfers to store data into a code page because isochronous is
> unreliable. (Audio isn't a counterexample -- audio data may be mapped
> to userspace, but only to data pages, not code pages. And the problem
> here is to maintain consistency between the D and I caches.)

My issues is with both I-D coherency and D-cache aliasing caused by
pages mapped in both user and kernel space (with different colours). The
flush_dcache_page() call should target both cases.

--
Catalin

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