Re: ioremap()/PCI sickness in 2.4.18-rc2 (FIXED ALMOST)

[Jeff V. Merkey]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 11:06:17PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Sigh .... I am only using 2 GB on a 4GB capable processor (actually 
> > a 64 GB capable processor).  Looks like a patch is needed.  Who is 
> > maintaining vmalloc.c at present so I know who to submit a patch 
> > to?
> 
> Actually you are using a 64Gb capable processor that is only capable of 
> sanely addressing 4Gb at a time, total across both user and kernel space
> and takes a hefty hit whenever you switch which 4Gb you are peering at.
> 
> If you want to make sensible use of even 4Gb user/4Gb kernel you need to
> take a page table reload at syscall time and deal with quite messy handling
> for copy to/from user. 
> 
> [If someone from Intel disagrees please do so publically - I'd love to have
>  someone prove the limit can be dealt with 8)]

I'll get to work on it.  The 4 bit PTE extention to enable 48 bit
addresses is quite ugly, and I agree -- heavy.  There may. however, 
be no other way to make this work properly.  The SCI address space is 
explicitly addressable, so it may be possible to enable this on 
the PCI-SCI adapters **ONLY** (not ccNuma) without getting into
general user/kernel copy issues since the SCI address space is 
typically assumed in this model to be an explicit entity for most
apps.   :-)

Jeff

Jeff

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