[U-Boot] [PATCH] nios2: convert cache flush to use dm cpu data

[Marek Vasut]

On Friday, October 09, 2015 at 10:00:26 AM, Thomas Chou wrote:
> Hi Marek,
> 
> On 10/09/2015 10:49 AM, Ley Foon Tan wrote:
> >> Is this an attempt at poor-mans' rounding ? I think you want to implment
> >> something like arch/arm/cpu/arm926ejs/cache.c check_cache_range() and
> >> NOT do any rounding here. The reason for that is that if you do
> >> rounding, you might accidentally corrupt a piece of memory which was
> >> just delivered via DMA before you did the flush.
> > 
> > The code above is to convert the address to dcache line size.
> > arch/arm/cpu/arm926ejs/cache.c check_cache_range() will skip the cache
> > flushing if it is unaligned to cache line size. I'm not sure how
> > frequent U-boot access to non-aligned cache line size.
> 
> Thanks a lot for your looking into this, Ley Foon.
> 
> I think we take cache flushing in a different way to arm926ejs.
> 
> In nios2 driver programming, we would request all the DMA buffers be
> aligned to cache line. This is necessary to avoid the cache racing issue
> as you mention above.

This is what ARM does as well.

> In nios2, we don't skip the flushing when the inputs are not aligned
> like that of arm926ejs. We always flush all cache lines in the range,
> even if a single byte to flush is in request. So the inputs are rounded
> to get the lower and upper cache lines range inside the cache flush
> functions. The caller need not be aware of the detail.

This is incorrect and all the places which produce these unaligned cache
operations must be fixed.

> In the copy_exception_trampoline() patch, both dcache and icache must be
> flushed at the exception target address. Though the flush range is only
> 12 bytes, which won't be aligned.
> 
> Thank you for your review.
> 
> Best regards,
> Thomas

Best regards,
Marek Vasut