Re: XIP (Rev. 2)

[Eduardo Horvath <eeh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Masao Uebayashi wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 03:18:37PM +0000, Eduardo Horvath wrote:

> > There are two issues I see with the design and I don't understand how 
> > they are addressed:
> > 
> > 1) On machines where the cache is responsible for handling ECC, how do you 
> > prevent a user from trying to mount a device XIP, causing a data error and 
> > a system crash?
> 
> Sorry, I don't understand this situation...  How does this differ
> from user mapped RAM pages with ECC?

Ok, I'll try to explain the hardware.

In an ECC setup you have extra RAM bits to store the ECC data.  That data 
is generated when data is writen to RAM and checked when it's read back 
from RAM.  This is usually done in the memory controller so the extra data 
is not stored in the cache.  The ECC domain is RAM.

If your machine uses ECC in the cache, then the ECC information is 
generated and checked when the data is inserted and removed from the 
cache.  The ECC domain is not RAM but cache.  In this case if you try to 
set the bit in the PTE to enable caching for an address that does not 
provide ECC bits, such as a FLASH PROM, when the data enters the cache it 
has no ECC infomation and the cache generates a fault.

On these machines the cache can only be enabled for RAM.


> > 2) How will this work with mfs and memory disks where you really want to 
> > use XIP always but the pages are standard, managed RAM?
> 
> This is a good question.  What you need to do is:
> 
> - Provide a block device interface (mount)
> 
> - Provide a vnode pager interface (page fault)
> 
> You'll allocate managed RAM pages in the memory disk driver, and
> keep them.  When a file is accessed, fault handler asks vnode pager
> to give relevant pages back to it.
> 
> My current code assumes XIP backend is always a contiguous MMIO
> device.  Both physical address pages and metadata (vm_page) are
> contiguous, we can look up matching vm_pages (genfs_getpages_xip).
>
> If you want to use managed RAM pages, you need to manage a collection
> of vm_pages, presented as a range.  This is exactly what uvm_object
> is for.  I think it's natural that device drivers own uvm_object, and
> return their pages back to other subsystems, or "loan" pages to
> other uvm_objects like vnode.  The problem is, the current I/O
> subsystem and UVM are not integrated very well.
> 
> So, the answer is, you can't do that now, but it's a known problem.
> 
> (Extending uvm_object and using it everywhere is the way to go.)

Hm.  Does this mean two separate XIP implementations are needed for I/O 
devices and managd RAM?

Eduardo