From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262373AbTKDQNi (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Nov 2003 11:13:38 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262375AbTKDQNi (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Nov 2003 11:13:38 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:60822 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262373AbTKDQNh (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Nov 2003 11:13:37 -0500 Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 08:13:32 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: Zwane Mwaikambo cc: Linux Kernel Subject: Re: [PATCH][2.6] Dont use cpu_has_pse for WP test branch In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Zwane Mwaikambo wrote: > > It appears that not all processors which support PSE have the PSE bit set, > possibly we should be checking with PSE36 too. But instead i've opted to > simply check for 586+ Why? The reason we test the PSE bit is not that we think it's a good indicator of "new enough". It's because if the PSE bit is set, we will use 4MB pages, and the code below that actually _tests_ whether WP works or not won't work. So it doesn't _matter_ that > Celeron (Mendocino): fpu vme de tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca > cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr > > Opteron 240: fpu vme de tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat > pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow do not have PSE, they'll just end up testing dynamically if it works or not. In fact, these days we could remove the test entirely: the only reason it exists is because traditionally we didn't have the "fixmap" helpers, so we used the page in lowest kernel memory for testing (which did not exist if we had PSE, since with PSE the kernel wouldn't use individual pages to map itself). Linus