On Fri, Oct 15, 1999 at 10:50:11AM -0700, Kanoj Sarcar wrote:
> Looking in 2.3.21, all the find_vma's in arch/mips/mm/r4xx0.c are used to
> set a flag called "text" which is not used at all. Also, if the find_vma
> returns null, the code basically does nothing. So the optimized icache
> flushing is probably not implemented yet?
Not my day when I wrote my last posting ... I was actually looking at
r4k_flush_cache_page* which gets a vma argument passed in, so they doesn't
do a find_vma. That use of the text flag there is broken. Scenario:
1) a process tries to execute code in a vma with VM_READ set but VM_EXEC
clear, thereby poluting the i-cache.
2) context switch to another process on this same CPU.
3) this second process faults on a non-present code page. The virtual address
happens to be one of those that are in the i-cache from 1).
4) mm steals a page of that vma which is cached in the i-cache.
5) flush_cache_page will be called but will skip i-cache flushing because
the page isn't VM_EXEC.
6) do_no_page knows that the page cannot yet have entered a cache, therefore
skips cache flushing completly.
7) New process executes code from old process.
Or is there a reason why this cannot happen?
> Then, the only reason to do the flush_vma currently is to check whether
> the lower level flush routine should be called. Without holding some
> locks, this is always tricky to do on a third party mm.
> Btw, this probably belongs to linux-mips, but what do you mean by saying
Yep, cc-list truncated heavily.
> the icache might be dirty? Its been a while since I worked on the
> older mips chips, but as far as I remember, the icache can not hold
> dirty lines.
Braino, I meant the valid state of the i-Cache. The problem is that an
attempt to execute a page which's vma doesn't have VM_EXEC but VM_READ set
may still pollute the the i-cache. So we must flush the i-cache in any
case or a later re-use of the affected physical pages at the same virtual
address might do funny things.
(On the R3000 which allows swapping of i-cache and d-cache for diagnostic
purposes it actually is possible to have dirty lines in the d-cache when
it's used as the i-cache. But that's not a consideration for Linux.)
Ralf
