On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 10:18:50PM +0800, Fuxin Zhang wrote:

I just run a fresh new 2.4.21 kernel on my board, no luck.  The problem 
remains.  But I notice that my hardware may have some problems,
especially with the add-on ide card. Keep headaching...

As to the discussion of SYNC, I can't help wondering whether the cache 
management should be totally hidden from programmers. People tends to
write "safetest" code because of all kinds of brain-damage different
hardware, which leads to inefficient code. And this will cancel out the
potential speed benefit of simpler hardware. Also today's hardware seems
not as expensive as it was before...

Cache managment needs to be somehow hidden from programmers as well as
possible - the average programmer has no clue about how caches work.
We've come up with an API that hides the actual functioning of caches
pretty well for DMA devices, see Documentation/DMA-mapping.txt and in
2.6 also a more generalized version documented in Documentation/DMA-API.txt.

  Ralf