Cache invalidation issue on arm

[Tomasz Gajewski]

Hi,

during my attempts to make framebuffer driver working on rpi3b+ I had
problems with memory caching. Effect was that I received from gpu
information that result message was processed but couldn't see results -
read memory always contained content of message and not response.

Before I found a simple fix - ask dataspace for an uncached memory - I
tried to call 'Kernel::update_data_region' but it didn't work for
me. During my experiments I tried to dump memory from
'Kernel::Thread::_call_update_data_region()' for virtual address range
passed to this function and it worked.

In that function there is a comment that states that kernel operates in
different address space than the caller for threads other than core. In
that case different method of cache invalidation was called:
'clean_invalidate_data_cache', that should invalidate all cache. For
core threads 'clean_invalidate_data_cache_by_virt_region' was used.

Successfully dumping memory passed to _call_update_data_region() (using
virtual address) made me think that a comment there about address spaces
is wrong and - as an attempt to see what happens - I changed code to
always call invalidating memory for given region only. This change [1]
resolved issues with not seeing responses from gpu regarding framebuffer
setup.

If I'm not mistaken then:

 1. Comment in 'Kernel::Thread::_call_update_data_region()' is not true
    anymore and code can be changed to always call more efficient
    version that invalidates always only cache for region of memory.

 2. 'clean_invalidate_data_cache' is not working on rpi3b+ properly. I
    wouldn't be really surprised as I used code from Cortex A15,
    available already in Genode, without checking if Cortex A53 requires
    a different code (even for AArch32 mode).

Please give me information if kernel is now mapped into every address
space (as is stated in the aforementioned comment as a future goal) and
my change is a correct one. If it is not the case can you provide some
other possible explanation of this?

Tomasz Gajewski


PS. As a minor addtion I found a trivial function documentation bug that
    I fixed in [2].



[1] https://github.com/tomga/genode/commit/5a5adc06d9889129f2f1efd9a36be0ef52bb2f66
[2] https://github.com/tomga/genode/commit/f25fad3c2957b843b549665cd7bcb50bec1d17d9