[PATCH RFC 10/15] x86: add an arch helper function to invalidate all cache for nvdimm

Davidlohr Bueso dave at stgolabs.net
Wed Aug 10 14:13:37 PDT 2022


On Wed, 10 Aug 2022, Dan Williams wrote:

>I expect the interface would not be in the "flush_cache_" namespace
>since those functions are explicitly for virtually tagged caches that
>need maintenance on TLB operations that change the VA to PA association.
>In this case the cache needs maintenance because the data at the PA
>changes. That also means that putting it in the "nvdimm_" namespace is
>also wrong because there are provisions in the CXL spec where volatile
>memory ranges can also change contents at a given PA, for example caches
>might need to be invalidated if software resets the device, but not the
>platform.
>
>Something like:
>
>    region_cache_flush(resource_size_t base, resource_size_t n, bool nowait)
>
>...where internally that function can decide if it can rely on an
>instruction like wbinvd, use set / way based flushing (if set / way
>maintenance can be made to work which sounds like no for arm64), or map
>into VA space and loop. If it needs to fall back to that VA-based loop
>it might be the case that the caller would want to just fail the
>security op rather than suffer the loop latency.

Yep, I was actually prototyping something similar, but want to still
reuse cacheflush.h machinery and just introduce cache_flush_region()
or whatever name, which returns any error. So all the logic would
just be per-arch, where x86 will do the wbinv and return 0, and arm64
can just do -EINVAL until VA-based is no longer the only way.

Thanks,
Davidlohr



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