On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:
On Friday 08 February 2013 16:22:48 Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
quoted
If it's DMA _to_ a device, then we will only ever clean the lines prior to
a transfer, never invalidate them. So that's not really a concern. (There
better not be any dirty cache lines associated with the empty zero page
either.)
Right, makes sense. I thought I had read about a CPU that
could not flush a cache line without also invalidating
it, but that must have been something other than ARM,
or maybe I'm misremembering it.
I don't think it matters one bit. The page can contain a bitmap
of Donald Duck or zero FWIW. It's just that the DMA
controller just neeeds to read *something* that does not cause
a bus stall.
It's due to the syncronous nature of the SPI protocol, to get
something out you need to put something in. So when reading,
this is a way to feed in some junk.
So this goes on my TODO...
Yours,
Linus Walleij