Re: Athlon possible fixes

Ralf Baechle (ralf@uni-koblenz.de)
Fri, 11 May 2001 01:02:53 -0300


On Sun, May 06, 2001 at 01:51:59PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:

> > There really needs to be a hardware fix... this doesn't stop some
> > application having it's owne optimised code from breaking on some
> > hardware (think games and similation software perhaps).
>
> prefetch is virtually addresses. An application would need access to /dev/mem
> or similar. So the only folks I think it might actually bite are the Xserver
> people.

Prefetch bugs in hardware have biten Linux/68k as early as '94; a GVP SCSI
HBA on the Amiga may touch areas beyond the last valid RAM address when
doing DMA to the last page. Being a burned child from that time Linux/MIPS
didn't use the last RAM page just to be on the safe side.

Ralf
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/