WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-ppc-devel

Re: [XenPPC] PATCH: Inline assembler for clear_page() and copy_page()

On Aug 25, 2006, at 5:48 PM, poff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Following code includes assembler versions of clear_page_cacheable (), by Xenidis, copy_page(), and copy_page_cacheable(). The 'cacheable' versions use 'dcbz' for
clearing cache lines; the target page is assumed to be cacheable.

On PowerPC, the cache is always on in RealMode and we have to do backflips (see io.S) to perform cache-inhibited actions.

This code has been debugged with a small application program on JS21. Also code has been incorporated into a xen tree and runs on JS21 (though copy_page() is not
being used).

note: in some documentation, dcbz is for 32 byte cache lines, dcbzl for 128

Dan, we (like linux) force all our cache line operations to be 128 bytes via the HID setting in ppc970.c where we set hid5. I see not that that could be better documented, I got lazy since the user manual for 970 is now public.

However, the crossbuild assembler does not recognize dcbzl. The native assembler (for building the test application) would accept either dcbz or dcbzl, and in either
case the 128 byte cache line was cleared.

the instruction is reserved for apple who are the only SW vendor that currently support and programming model for 32 byte cache operations.


note2: in page_alloc.c, one of the three clear_page() calls breaks the system
when changed to clear_page_cacheable().

Break how? build? run? hang?

-JX


_______________________________________________
Xen-ppc-devel mailing list
Xen-ppc-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-ppc-devel