arm_syscall cacheflush breakage on VIPT platforms

[Jamie Lokier]

Imre Deak wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 02:49:22PM +0200, ext Jamie Lokier wrote:
> > Imre Deak wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > the following test app will cause an unhandled kernel paging request
> > > on VIPT platforms. The triggering condition is the mmap_sem held by
> > > thread_func while the main thread performs cache flushing.
> > > 
> > > Since the likelihood of this to trigger is relatively low, a patch will
> > > follow that makes similar bugs more visible.
> > 
> > I would expect the likelihood of triggering would be higher for at
> > least one of Java, Mono, Parrot or any of the modern Javascript
> > engines.
> 
> True, the above statement is only valid for certain use patterns. I was
> mainly interested in applications that do user range cache flushing as
> part of their DMA requests and they didn't have threads with frequent
> syscalls that required mmap_sem, so the problem remained hidden for a
> long time.

Aieee.  Is sys_cacheflush architecturally the Right Way to do DMA to
userspace, or is it just luck that it happens to work?

Does that include O_DIRECT regular file I/O as used by databases on
these ARMs?  (Nobody ever gives a straight answer)

-- Jamie