Re: [PATCH] Intel x86-64 support merge

From: David Mosberger-Tang
Date: Thu Feb 19 2004 - 23:05:05 EST


>>>>> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 17:06:58 -0500, Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> said:

Bill> David Mosberger-Tang wrote:
>>>>>>> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 00:40:24 +0100, Arjan van de Ven
>>>>>>> <arjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
>>
Arjan> On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 23:57, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> >> Because they were caught by surprise and just hacked the chips
>> >> they had in the pipeline, presumably.

Arjan> fair enough; I hope this means the next generation has this
Arjan> wart fixed...
>> I wouldn't hold my breath. My impression was that the Intel
>> chipset folks don't want I/O MMU because (a) Windows doesn't need
>> it and (b) real machines use (close-to-)64-bit-capable hardware.

Bill> Doesn't need it? Does that mean the Win64 uses bounce buffers
Bill> for everything? Or am I totally misreading this?

Remember: I'm just the messenger here...

I have no idea what Win64 does, but obviously bounce buffering is only
an issue for devices that can't address all physical memory. These
days, even relatively low-end machines have devices that can address
"more than enough" physical memory (I'm not sure exactly what the DMA
limit of, say, a Kenai32 e1000 card is, but it's a lot more than 4GB).

--david
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