Re: [PATCH 29/31] parisc: handle page-less SG entries

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 9:11 PM, David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> At least on some PA architectures, you have to be very careful.
>> Improperly managed, multiple aliases will cause the system to crash
>> (actually a machine check in the cache chequerboard). For the most
>> temperamental systems, we need the cache line flushed and the alias
>> mapping ejected from the TLB cache before we access the same page at an
>> inequivalent alias.
>
> Also, I want to mention that on sparc64 we manage the cache aliasing
> state in the page struct.
>
> Until a page is mapped into userspace, we just record the most recent
> cpu to store into that page with kernel side mappings.  Once the page
> ends up being mapped or the cpu doing kernel side stores changes, we
> actually perform the cache flush.
>
> Generally speaking, I think that all actual physical memory the kernel
> operates on should have a struct page backing it.  So this whole
> discussion of operating on physical memory in scatter lists without
> backing page structs feels really foreign to me.

So the only way for page-less pfns to enter the system is through the
->direct_access() method provided by a pmem device's struct
block_device_operations.  Architectures that require struct page for
cache management to must disable ->direct_access() in this case.

If an arch still wants to support pmem+DAX then it needs something
like this patchset (feedback welcome) to map pmem pfns:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/8/12/970

Effectively this would disable ->direct_access() on /dev/pmem0, but
permit ->direct_access() on /dev/pmem0m.
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