Re: [PATCH v3] ad7877: keep dma rx buffers in seperate cache lines

[Mike Frysinger]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 16:07, Matt Mackall wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-05-11 at 16:03 -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 02:42, Pekka Enberg wrote:
>> > On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
>> >>> what guarantee exactly do you have for that statement ?
>> >>
>> >> The data is kmalloced, kmalloc aligns on cacheline boundary AFAIK which
>> >> means that next kmalloc data chunk will not share "our" cacheline.
>> >
>> > No, there are no such guarantees. kmalloc() aligns on
>> > ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN or ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN depending on which is
>> > bigger but beyond that, there are no guarantees. You can, of course,
>> > use kmem_cache_create() with SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN to align on cacheline
>> > boundary.
>>
>> so how is this to be addressed in general ? Âthis is a problem for any
>> device that does SPI transactions, and having every driver create its
>> own kmem cache isnt the answer.
>>
>> do people need to kmalloc() like 2x the desired size and manually
>> align it themselves ? Âdeclaring alignments on struct members doesnt
>> matter if the base of the struct isnt aligned. Âseems like we need a
>> new GFP flag that says we need a cache aligned pointer so we can give
>> that to kmalloc() and such.
>
> Make your own slab cache with the alignment flag set, as Pekka already
> mentioned.

and like i said, that doesnt sound like a reasonable solution when
every single SPI driver (over 100 atm) out there is affected
-mike
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