Ingo Molnar f180053694 x86, mm: dont use non-temporal stores in pagecache accesses
Impact: standardize IO on cached ops

On modern CPUs it is almost always a bad idea to use non-temporal stores,
as the regression in this commit has shown it:

  30d697f: x86: fix performance regression in write() syscall

The kernel simply has no good information about whether using non-temporal
stores is a good idea or not - and trying to add heuristics only increases
complexity and inserts fragility.

The regression on cached write()s took very long to be found - over two
years. So dont take any chances and let the hardware decide how it makes
use of its caches.

The only exception is drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c: there were we are
absolutely sure that another entity (the GPU) will pick up the dirty
data immediately and that the CPU will not touch that data before the
GPU will.

Also, keep the _nocache() primitives to make it easier for people to
experiment with these details. There may be more clear-cut cases where
non-cached copies can be used, outside of filemap.c.

Cc: Salman Qazi <sqazi@google.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
2009-03-02 11:06:49 +01:00
..
2008-10-18 07:10:10 +10:00
2008-10-18 07:10:53 +10:00
2009-01-22 17:53:05 +10:00
2009-01-06 15:59:11 -08:00
2008-12-29 17:47:22 +10:00
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2008-12-29 17:47:23 +10:00
2009-02-11 21:01:28 +01:00
2008-12-29 17:47:22 +10:00
2008-12-29 17:47:23 +10:00

************************************************************
* For the very latest on DRI development, please see:      *
*     http://dri.freedesktop.org/                          *
************************************************************

The Direct Rendering Manager (drm) is a device-independent kernel-level
device driver that provides support for the XFree86 Direct Rendering
Infrastructure (DRI).

The DRM supports the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) in four major
ways:

    1. The DRM provides synchronized access to the graphics hardware via
       the use of an optimized two-tiered lock.

    2. The DRM enforces the DRI security policy for access to the graphics
       hardware by only allowing authenticated X11 clients access to
       restricted regions of memory.

    3. The DRM provides a generic DMA engine, complete with multiple
       queues and the ability to detect the need for an OpenGL context
       switch.

    4. The DRM is extensible via the use of small device-specific modules
       that rely extensively on the API exported by the DRM module.


Documentation on the DRI is available from:
    http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Documentation
    http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=387
    http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/

For specific information about kernel-level support, see:

    The Direct Rendering Manager, Kernel Support for the Direct Rendering
    Infrastructure
    http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/drm_low_level.html

    Hardware Locking for the Direct Rendering Infrastructure
    http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/hardware_locking_low_level.html

    A Security Analysis of the Direct Rendering Infrastructure
    http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/security_low_level.html