Hi Russell,

On Mon, 2011-02-07 at 15:02 +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 04:58:05PM +0200, saeed bishara wrote:

quoted

well, the allocation of the identity page table doesn't need to be
done in assembly code. this is the similar to what you did in
__cpu_up.
for example, this allocation can be done in arch/arm/kernel/setup.c.
the assembly code only need to know the offset of this page table.
looks that there are several usages for the identity page table (smp
boot, kexec, pm), maybe all those clients can share the same one.

We don't want to allocate this at boot time, because it will require
additional maintainence when L1 page tables are added for ioremap() etc.

I feel that it's best to leave it as-is, as this is the method everyone
has been using to date.  When it becomes a problem, we can then look at
resolving it.

For v7 MP cpuidle it is already critical, we do need to have a page
table copy for the resume path to be MP safe. The same goes for the
stack pointer global variable which should be per cpu.
Maybe we can just provide an API to pass the page table pointer, then
see how to allocate it and when.
In which branch do these patches live in order to test them and 
provide feedback ?

Many thanks,
Lorenzo