[OpenBIOS] SPARC64: Forth re-entrancy during MMU I/D TLB miss

Mark Cave-Ayland mark.cave-ayland at siriusit.co.uk
Wed Sep 1 14:28:18 CEST 2010


Blue Swirl wrote:

>> So having a poke around various bits of documentation relating to
>> implementing pgmap@, I've come to the realisation that since the Solaris
>> kernel needs to install it's own va>tte-data implementation into OpenBIOS
>> then it's going to be necessary to call back into Forth from the D/I-MMU
>> miss traps.
> 
> The thought of that gives me the shivers.

It sounds scary, but I don't think it will be too bad. Looking at 
arch/sparc64/entry.S, it seems like the OpenBIOS memory regions are 
locked into the TLB as N x 512K entries - so as long as we don't end up 
with MMU miss trap recursion, we should be good.

The plan I have in my mind goes something like this:

- Alter the D/I-MMU trap miss handlers so they invoke a C function 
rather than iterate through the translations structure in ASM.

- Initially make the C function do exactly the same as the current ASM 
for testing.

- Create a simple Forth function to perform the address translation.

- Modify the C function to invoke feval(...) on the translation function 
instead of iterating through the translations structure directly.

>> I've been looking around the code in arch/sparc64/switch.S but it looks as
>> if this code only swaps between 2 individual contexts - am I right in
>> thinking there needs to be a way of specifying the memory address of the
>> context for this code to be reusable during a trap? Or would a better way be
>> to duplicate this file but with another static context used only for MMU
>> miss traps?
> 
> Sparc64 should use the same approach as Sparc32 (and x86): save the
> context to stack. It's even easier than Sparc32 because there is a
> window flush instruction.

Hmmm. SPARC64 definitely doesn't do this right at the moment - instead 
of saving context to the stack, it seems to save it back into the static 
context structure :(

Looks like the first trick is to figure out how to store the context on 
the stack instead. However, since __switch_context automatically 
restores all registers upon exit, I'm not sure even then we could use it 
  within a trap handler since we'd want the TTE data entry returned in 
one of the registers when we are finished so we can add the entry to the 
MMU. Maybe there is a better way of refactoring this code so we can 
share the majority of it?

Also I see that arch/sparc64/switch.S is marked as ".align 4" - 
shouldn't this be 8 for a 64-bit architecture? Not that it seems to 
matter at the moment...


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
PostgreSQL - PostGIS
Sirius Corporation plc - control through freedom
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
t: +44 870 608 0063

Sirius Labs: http://www.siriusit.co.uk/labs



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