Unnecessary cache-line flush on page table updates ?

heechul Yun heechul at illinois.edu
Fri Jul 1 03:04:42 EDT 2011


Catalin,

Based on TRM of Cortex A9, the MMU reads page table entries from L1-D
cache not from memory. Then I think we do not need to flush the cache
line in the following code because MMU will always see up-to-date view
of page table in both UP and SMP systems.

linux/arch/arm/mm/proc-v7.S

ENTRY(cpu_v7_set_pte_ext)
	...
        mcr     p15, 0, r0, c7, c10, 1          @ flush_pte from
D-cache // why we need this in A9?
        …

If this is a necessary one, could you please explain the reason? Thanks.



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