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Commit 26a945ca authored by Mark Rutland's avatar Mark Rutland Committed by Catalin Marinas
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arm64: remove broken cachepolicy code



The cachepolicy kernel parameter was intended to aid in the debugging of
coherency issues, but it is fundamentally broken for several reasons:

 * On SMP platforms, only the boot CPU's tcr_el1 is altered. Secondary
   CPUs may therefore use differ w.r.t. the attributes they apply to
   MT_NORMAL memory, resulting in a loss of coherency.

 * The cache maintenance using flush_dcache_all (based on Set/Way
   operations) is not guaranteed to empty a given CPU's cache hierarchy
   while said CPU has caches enabled, it cannot empty the caches of
   other coherent PEs, nor is it guaranteed to flush data to the PoC
   even when caches are disabled.

 * The TLBs are not invalidated around the modification of MAIR_EL1 and
   TCR_EL1, as required by the architecture (as both are permitted to be
   cached in a TLB). This may result in CPUs using attributes other than
   those expected for some memory accesses, resulting in a loss of
   coherency.

 * Exclusive accesses are not architecturally guaranteed to function as
   expected on memory marked as Write-Through or Non-Cacheable. Thus
   changing the attributes of MT_NORMAL away from the (architecurally
   safe) defaults may cause uses of these instructions (e.g. atomics) to
   behave erratically.

Given this, the cachepolicy code cannot be used for debugging purposes
as it alone is likely to cause coherency issues. This patch removes the
broken cachepolicy code.

Signed-off-by: default avatarMark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Acked-by: default avatarWill Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarCatalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
parent c26a535b
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