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io mapping: improve documentation
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Impact: add documentation

Signed-off-by: Keith Packard <keithp@keithp.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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Keith Packard authored and Ingo Molnar committed Nov 3, 2008
1 parent 0839ccb commit 8d5c660
Showing 1 changed file with 9 additions and 3 deletions.
12 changes: 9 additions & 3 deletions Documentation/io-mapping.txt
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -71,6 +71,12 @@ range, creating a permanent kernel-visible mapping to the resource. The
map_atomic and map functions add the requested offset to the base of the
virtual address returned by ioremap_wc.

On 32-bit processors, io_mapping_map_atomic_wc uses io_map_atomic_prot_pfn,
which uses the fixmaps to get us a mapping to a page using an atomic fashion.
For io_mapping_map_wc, ioremap_wc() is used to get a mapping of the region.
On 32-bit processors with HIGHMEM defined, io_mapping_map_atomic_wc uses
kmap_atomic_pfn to map the specified page in an atomic fashion;
kmap_atomic_pfn isn't really supposed to be used with device pages, but it
provides an efficient mapping for this usage.

On 32-bit processors without HIGHMEM defined, io_mapping_map_atomic_wc and
io_mapping_map_wc both use ioremap_wc, a terribly inefficient function which
performs an IPI to inform all processors about the new mapping. This results
in a significant performance penalty.

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