Accessing flash directly from User Space [SOLVED]

[Scott Wood]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 10:00:28AM +0100, Joakim Tjernlund wrote:
> > I have found the problem.  It occurred to me in the shower (okay not really,
> > but most good ideas happen there).
> >
> > What was happening is that I was in fact able to write to the correct
> > registers.  However, I would try and write to them in a batch.  But the way
> > mmap works (at least according to the man page) with MAP_SHARED is that the
> > file may not be updated until msync() is called.  Now, I thought that O_SYNC
> > would take care of that when I open /dev/mem, but that was not the case.
> >
> > Anyway, to make a long story short, I inserted an msync() after each
> > assignment to the flash.  This resolved my problem and I can now program my flash.
> 
> Ouch, this was news to me too. Calling msync() after every write kills performance.
> We use mmap(/dev/mem) to access HW and havn't seen any issues yet. Is this
> perhaps a new behaviour for mmap(/dev/mem) and is there a way
> to avoid calling msync()?

I suspect that the msync() was merely serving as a very heavyweight
memory barrier.

-Scott