On 10/26/2016 02:29 PM, york sun wrote:
On 10/26/2016 01:12 PM, Stephen Warren wrote:
On 10/26/2016 01:54 PM, york sun wrote:
On 10/26/2016 12:47 PM, Stephen Warren wrote:
There are two data structures in ARM U-Boot that describe memory layout:
- A list of RAM memory regions. U-Boot uses these to know where to
relocate itself to (it relocates itself to the top of RAM at boot), and to fill in the /memory node when booting an OS using DT (and other equivalent mechanisms when not using DT.)
- For AArch64 specifically, there's a memory map table that defines all
RAM and MMIO regions, and the translation table attributes required for those regions.
Judging by your comments later in the original message, it sounds like it'd be fine to read from these structures during any dcache clean routine provided the table has already been cleaned. That makes using the tables much more tractable:-)
I think we need to benchmark walking through the MMU tables. It can map huge amount of memory. For our case, it is more than 16GB. I have been reluctant to do so for the size. I am now back testing to revert _this_ patch, hoping to confirm what I learned from this discussion. After that, I will see how long it takes to flush all cached addresses by VA.
Given the existence of the two data structures I mentioned above, I don't think we'd ever need to walk the MMU translation tables (assuming you mean the data structures U-Boot creates and configures into the CPU's MMU), rather than just walking over the tiny number of entries in those data structures?
The list of RAM used by U-Boot is different from the total memory. U-Boot relocates itself to the gd->ram_top. We may have memory in second region, or even the third region.
We also have other cached region other than RAM. I know for Layerscape SoCs, there is QMan portal has 64MB cached. If we consider to flush _all_ address, they should be included.
I think the 2nd data structure you mentioned is the MMU table for aarch64, isn't it?
The 2nd data structure I mentioned is what U-Boot uses to create the translation tables, but isn't the translation table itself.