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

[Mike Frysinger]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 17:53, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 11:48:36PM +0200, Johannes Weiner wrote:
>> On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 04:54:41PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> > does the phrase "DMA safe buffer" imply cache alignment ?
>>
>> I guess that depends on the architectural requirements. ÂOn x86,
>> apparently, not so much. ÂOn ARM, probably yes, as it's the
>> requirement to properly maintain coherency.
>
> It looks liek ARM (and a few others) do this:
>
> [dtor@hammer work]$ grep -r ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN arch/
> arch/sh/include/asm/page.h:#define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN Â Â Â ÂL1_CACHE_BYTES
> arch/frv/include/asm/mem-layout.h:#define    ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN      8
> arch/powerpc/include/asm/page_32.h:#define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN Â Â Â ÂL1_CACHE_BYTES
> arch/arm/include/asm/cache.h:#define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN Â Â ÂL1_CACHE_BYTES
> arch/microblaze/include/asm/page.h:#define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN Â Â Â ÂL1_CACHE_BYTES
> arch/mips/include/asm/mach-tx49xx/kmalloc.h: * All happy, no need to define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN
> arch/mips/include/asm/mach-ip27/kmalloc.h: * All happy, no need to define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN
> arch/mips/include/asm/mach-ip32/kmalloc.h:#define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN 32
> arch/mips/include/asm/mach-ip32/kmalloc.h:#define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN 128
> arch/mips/include/asm/mach-generic/kmalloc.h:#define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN Â Â Â128
> arch/avr32/include/asm/cache.h:#define ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN Â ÂL1_CACHE_BYTES

if ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN is not defined, the current allocators default to:
 slub - alignof(unsigned long long)
 slab - alignof(unsigned long long)
 slob - alignof(unsigned long)
which for many arches can mean an alignment of merely 4 or 8

lets look at the cacheline sizes for arches that dont set
ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN to L1_CACHE_BYTES:
 - alplha - 32 or 64
 - frv - 32 or 64
 - blackfin - 32
 - parisc - 32 or 64
 - mn10300 - 16
 - s390 - 256
 - score - 16
 - sparc - 32
 - xtensa - 16 or 32

assuming alpha and s390 handle cache coherency in hardware, it looks
to me like the proposed assumption (kmalloc returns cachealigned
pointers when cache management is in software) does not hold true.

so should these other arches also be setting ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN to
L1_CACHE_BYTES ?
-mike
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