On Fri, 26 Feb 2010, Catalin Marinas wrote:

For mmap'ed pages (and present in the page cache), is it guaranteed that
the HCD driver won't write to it once it has been mapped into user
space? If that's the case, it may solve the problem by just reversing
the meaning of PG_arch_1 on ARM and assume that a newly allocated page
has dirty D-cache by default.

Nothing is guaranteed.  The HCD will write to wherever it is asked.  If 
a driver does input to an mmap'ed page, the HCD won't even know that 
the page is mmap'ed.

Alan Stern