[PATCH] arm64: drop unnecessary cache+tlb maintenance

Mark Rutland mark.rutland at arm.com
Tue Jan 27 08:52:50 PST 2015


In paging_init, we call flush_cache_all, but this is backed by Set/Way
operations which may not achieve anything in the presence of cache line
migration and/or system caches. If the caches are already in an
inconsistent state at this point, there is nothing we can do (short of
flushing the entire physical address space by VA) to empty architected
and system caches. As such, flush_cache_all only serves to mask other
potential bugs. Hence, this patch removes the boot-time call to
flush_cache_all.

Immediately after the cache maintenance we flush the TLBs, but this is
also unnecessary. Before enabling the MMU, the TLBs are invalidated, and
thus are initially clean. When changing the contents of active tables
(e.g. in fixup_executable() for DEBUG_RODATA) we perform the required
TLB maintenance following the update, and therefore no additional
maintenance is required to ensure the new table entries are in effect.
Since activating the MMU we will not have modified system register
fields permitted to be cached in a TLB, and therefore do not need
maintenance for any cached system register fields. Hence, the TLB flush
is unnecessary.

Shortly after the unnecessary TLB flush, we update TTBR0 to point to an
empty zero page rather than the idmap, and flush the TLBs. This
maintenance is necessary to remove the global idmap entries from the
TLBs (as they would conflict with userspace mappings), and is retained.

Signed-off-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland at arm.com>
Acked-by: Marc Zyngier <marc.zyngier at arm.com>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas at arm.com>
Cc: Steve Capper <steve.capper at linaro.org>
Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com>
---
 arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c | 7 -------
 1 file changed, 7 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c b/arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c
index 29fe8aa..88f7ac2 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c
+++ b/arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c
@@ -431,13 +431,6 @@ void __init paging_init(void)
 	map_mem();
 	fixup_executable();
 
-	/*
-	 * Finally flush the caches and tlb to ensure that we're in a
-	 * consistent state.
-	 */
-	flush_cache_all();
-	flush_tlb_all();
-
 	/* allocate the zero page. */
 	zero_page = early_alloc(PAGE_SIZE);
 
-- 
1.9.1




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