Hello,
I am currently trying to work a bit on the remaining "missing feature"
that NVIDIA requires ( http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests or a
back post in this ML) - the improved mmap system call.
For now, I am trying to extend the current system call and implementation
to add cache control ( the type of memory caching used) . This feature
inherently is very architecture specific- but it can lead to enormous
performance improvements for memmapped devices ( useful for drivers, etc).
I would do this at the user site by adding 3 flags to the mmap system call
(MEM_CACHE__ATTR1 to MEM_CACHE__ATTR3 ) which are a single octal digit
corresponding to the various caching options ( like Uncacheable,Write
Combining, etc... ) with the same numbers as the PAT_* macros from
i386/include/specialreg.h except that the value 0 ( PAT_UNCACHEABLE ) is
replaced with value 2 ( undefined), whereas value 0 ( all 3 flags cleared)
is assigned the meaning "feature not used, use default cache control".
For each cache behaviour there would of course also be a macro expanding
to the rigth combination of these flags for enhanced useability.
The mmap system call would, if any of these flags are set, decode them
and get a corresponding PAT_* value, perform the mapping and then call
into the pmap module to modify the cache attributes for every page.
My first question is if there is a more elegant way of solving that - the
3 flags would be architecture specific ( they could be used for other
things on other architectures though if need be ) and I do not know the
policy on architecture specific syscall flags, therefore I appreciate any
input.
The second question goes to all those great VM/pmap gurus out there: As
far as I understand, at the moment the pmap_change_attr can only cange the
cache flags for kernel pages. Is there a particular reason why this
function might not be adapted/extended to userspace mappings? If not, I
would either add a new function to iterate over all pages and set cache
flags for a particular region or add a new member (possibly just add the 3
flags again ? ) to the md part of vm_page_t. Or one could just keep track
and return errors as soon as someone tries to map a memory region (
cache-customized mapping is usually done to device memory ) already mapped
with different cache behaviour.
I thank you for your assistance & happy coding,
--Julian Bangert
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