[PATCH] fixes for the SLB shadow buffer
Michael Neuling
mikey at neuling.org
Thu Aug 2 18:56:48 EST 2007
> >
> > But even in the case of a checkpoint restart, the ordering will be
> > preserved as the NIA we get as part of the checkpoint will have all
> > previous instructions complete and none of the following instructions
> > started.
>
> Instruction completion isn't enough to ensure storage ordering. The
> stores may well be complete but the data still in separate store queues.
POWER6 flushes the store queues when we take a checkpoint.
>
> > So I guess the questions is, does PHYP even need to access the shadow
> > buffer of another CPU, while that other CPU is in flight. I'm not
> > sure
> > that they can as they can't read the entire buffer atomically if the
> > target CPU is still active. So PHYP must stop instructions on the
> > target CPU, before it reads it's shadow buffer. Hence no ordering
> > problems.
> >
> > I should probably talk to some PHYP guys to confirm, but i think we
> > can
> > remove all the barriers when writing to the shadow buffer
>
> Bah, just keep then in, eieio's won't hurt much and it doesn't look like
> a critically hot code path.
Ok
Mikey
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