Li-Ta Lo ollie@lanl.gov writes:
Eric,
What was the conclusion of invalidating the cache and TLB ? If found that
xorl %eax, %eax movl %eax, %cr3 /* Invalidate TLB*/
still exists in the current CVS.
Cache invalidates are actively harmful, as they can loose data that has not been written from the cache and they take seconds on an Opteron to execute.
Currently TLB invalidates don't have any negative side effects and seem harmless. Since TLB do not cache writes I can't think of a case where they would cause incorrect behavior. If they start running slow on some we can revisit the issue.
Eric