Re: [PATCH] x86: create array based interface to change page attribute

[Thomas Hellström]

Jesse Barnes wrote:
> On Monday, April 07, 2008 1:46 pm Thomas Hellström wrote:
>   
> > > Why would we need to flush at all at unbind-read-bind time?  We should be
> > > able to leave pages in the WC state even when we unbind them, then when
> > > we need to bind them back into the GTT they'll be ready, but maybe I'm
> > > misunderstanding you here...
> > >       
> > We want to make the user-space mapping cache-coherent after unbind
> > during read, to have any serious read-speed, and the linear kernel map
> > has to follow, unless it's non-present. Even if it's non present, we
> > need to flush whatever was written through the user-space mapping from
> > the cache when rebinding. Having the user-space mapping read-only when
> > possible will help avoid this.
> >     
>
> Ah, you actually want to *read* from memory?  Yeah that would be really slow 
> if we left it UC or WC.  But I thought that was really only necessary for 
> relocation, and keithp dealt with that with the "presumed offset" stuff?  Are 
> you seeing other cases where we need to read back frequently?
>   
While keithp's "presumed offset" is really good stuff, we should never 
need to read from device memory during relocations, I think. I was 
thinking of EXA and OpenGL software fallback cases, "download from 
screen" and "readpixels" types of operation, as well as 
pixel-buffer-object map in read mode.

/Thomas



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