[PATCHv8 00/12] Contiguous Memory Allocator

[Tomasz Fujak]

On 2010-12-23 14:51, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 02:41:26PM +0100, Michal Nazarewicz wrote:
>> Russell King - ARM Linux <linux at arm.linux.org.uk> writes:
>>> Has anyone addressed my issue with it that this is wide-open for
>>> abuse by allocating large chunks of memory, and then remapping
>>> them in some way with different attributes, thereby violating the
>>> ARM architecture specification?
>>>
>>> In other words, do we _actually_ have a use for this which doesn't
>>> involve doing something like allocating 32MB of memory from it,
>>> remapping it so that it's DMA coherent, and then performing DMA
>>> on the resulting buffer?
>> Huge pages.
>>
>> Also, don't treat it as coherent memory and just flush/clear/invalidate
>> cache before and after each DMA transaction.  I never understood what's
>> wrong with that approach.
> If you've ever used an ARM system with a VIVT cache, you'll know what's
> wrong with this approach.
>
> ARM systems with VIVT caches have extremely poor task switching
> performance because they flush the entire data cache at every task switch
> - to the extent that it makes system performance drop dramatically when
> they become loaded.
>
> Doing that for every DMA operation will kill the advantage we've gained
> from having VIPT caches and ASIDs stone dead.
This statement effectively means: don't map dma-able memory to the CPU
unless it's uncached. Have I missed anything?

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