Hi,
it is interesting to observe that many questions that deal with _details_
are answered quickly but questions related to fundamental concepts related
to how Linux is designed, baffle all of us (since 0 people answered). So,
is there really nobody in the whole world who can answer this? I would
like to know the answer (about global kernel memory layout - i.e. what
goes into PSE pages and what goes into normal ones, and how does PAE mode
change the picture?) myself...
I suppose one could find the answer by looking at each element of
mem_map[] but it is always more comfortable to look for answers when one
already knows the correct answer beforehand.
Regards,
Tigran
On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, Timur Tabi wrote:
> When my driver wants to map virtual to physical (and vice versa) addresses, it
> calls virt_to_phys and phys_to_virt. All these macros do is add or subtract a
> constant (PAGE_OFFSET) to one address to get the other address.
>
> How does the kernel configure the CPU (x86) to use this mapping? I was under
> the impression that the kernel creates a series of 4MB pages, using the x86's
> 4MB page feature. For example, in a 64MB machine, there would be 16 PTEs (PGDs?
> PMDs?), each one mapping a consecutive 4MB block of physical memory. Is this
> correct? Somehow I believe that this is overly simplistic.
>
> The reason I ask is that I'm confused as to what happens when a user process or
> tries to allocate memory. I assume that the VM uses 4KB pages for this
> allocatation. So do we end up with two virtual addresses pointing the same
> physical memory?
>
> What happens if I use ioremap_nocache() on normal memory? Is that memory
> cached or uncached? If I use the pointer obtained via phys_to_virt(), the
> memory is cached. But if I use the pointer returned from ioremap_nocache(), the
> memory is uncached. My understanding of x86 is that caching is based on
> physical, not virtual addresses. If so, it's not possible for a physical
> address to be both cached and uncached at the same.
>
> Could someone please straighten me out?
>
>
>
> --
> Timur Tabi - ttabi@interactivesi.com
> Interactive Silicon - http://www.interactivesi.com
>
> When replying to a mailing-list message, please don't cc: me, because then I'll just get two copies of the same message.
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