On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 06:46:50PM +0100, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

On Wed, 31 Aug 2011, Will Deacon wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 02:43:33PM +0100, Mark Salter wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 2011-08-31 at 09:49 +0100, Will Deacon wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 01:23:47AM +0100, Chen Peter-B29397 wrote:

quoted

One question: why this write buffer issue did not happen at UP ARM V7 platform, whose dma buffer
also uncache, but bufferable?

Which CPU was on this platform?

Using a 3.1.0-rc4+ kernel on a Pandaboard, and running 'hdparm -t' on a
usb disk drive, I see ~5.8MB/s read speed. Same kernel, but passing
nosmp on the commandline, I see 20.3MB/s.

Can someone explain why nosmp would make such a difference?

Oh gawd, that's horrible. I have a feeling it's probably a separate issue
though, caused by:

omap_modify_auxcoreboot0(0x200, 0xfffffdff);

in boot_secondary for OMAP. Unfortunately I have no idea what that line is
doing because it ends up talking to the secure monitor.

Well, this issue is apparently affecting other ARMv9 implementations 
too.  In which case this code in arch/arm/mm/mmu.c could be responsible:

                if (is_smp()) {
                        /*
                         * Mark memory with the "shared" attribute
                         * for SMP systems
                         */
                        user_pgprot |= L_PTE_SHARED;
                        kern_pgprot |= L_PTE_SHARED;
                        vecs_pgprot |= L_PTE_SHARED;
                        mem_types[MT_DEVICE_WC].prot_sect |= PMD_SECT_S;
                        mem_types[MT_DEVICE_WC].prot_pte |= L_PTE_SHARED;
                        mem_types[MT_DEVICE_CACHED].prot_sect |= PMD_SECT_S;
                        mem_types[MT_DEVICE_CACHED].prot_pte |= L_PTE_SHARED;
                        mem_types[MT_MEMORY].prot_sect |= PMD_SECT_S;
                        mem_types[MT_MEMORY].prot_pte |= L_PTE_SHARED;
                        mem_types[MT_MEMORY_NONCACHED].prot_sect |= PMD_SECT_S;
                        mem_types[MT_MEMORY_NONCACHED].prot_pte |= L_PTE_SHARED;
                }

However I don't see the nosmp kernel argument having any effect on the 
result from is_smp().

Yes, the first thing that sprung to mind was the shared attribute, but like
you say, that doesn't seem to be affected by the nosmp command line
argument.

Another thing that Marc and I tried on OMAP4 was not bringing up the secondary
CPU during boot (by commenting out most of smp_init). In this case, I/O
performance was good until we tried to online the secondary CPU. The online
failed but after that the I/O performance was certainly degraded.

Will