1Memory management for CRIS/MMU
2------------------------------
3HISTORY:
4
5$Log: README.mm,v $
6Revision 1.1.1.1  2007/08/03 18:51:41  rnuti
7Importing Linux MIPS Kernel 2.6.22
8
9Revision 1.1  2001/12/17 13:59:27  bjornw
10Initial revision
11
12Revision 1.1  2000/07/10 16:25:21  bjornw
13Initial revision
14
15Revision 1.4  2000/01/17 02:31:59  bjornw
16Added discussion of paging and VM.
17
18Revision 1.3  1999/12/03 16:43:23  hp
19Blurb about that the 3.5G-limitation is not a MMU limitation
20
21Revision 1.2  1999/12/03 16:04:21  hp
22Picky comment about not mapping the first page
23
24Revision 1.1  1999/12/03 15:41:30  bjornw
25First version of CRIS/MMU memory layout specification.
26
27
28
29
30
31------------------------------
32
33See the ETRAX-NG HSDD for reference.
34
35We use the page-size of 8 kbytes, as opposed to the i386 page-size of 4 kbytes.
36
37The MMU can, apart from the normal mapping of pages, also do a top-level
38segmentation of the kernel memory space. We use this feature to avoid having
39to use page-tables to map the physical memory into the kernel's address
40space. We also use it to keep the user-mode virtual mapping in the same
41map during kernel-mode, so that the kernel easily can access the corresponding
42user-mode process' data.
43
44As a comparision, the Linux/i386 2.0 puts the kernel and physical RAM at
45address 0, overlapping with the user-mode virtual space, so that descriptor
46registers are needed for each memory access to specify which MMU space to
47map through. That changed in 2.2, putting the kernel/physical RAM at 
480xc0000000, to co-exist with the user-mode mapping. We will do something
49quite similar, but with the additional complexity of having to map the
50internal chip I/O registers and the flash memory area (including SRAM
51and peripherial chip-selets).
52
53The kernel-mode segmentation map:
54
55        ------------------------                ------------------------
56FFFFFFFF|                      | => cached      |                      | 
57        |    kernel seg_f      |    flash       |                      |
58F0000000|______________________|                |                      |
59EFFFFFFF|                      | => uncached    |                      | 
60        |    kernel seg_e      |    flash       |                      |
61E0000000|______________________|                |        DRAM          |
62DFFFFFFF|                      |  paged to any  |      Un-cached       | 
63        |    kernel seg_d      |    =======>    |                      |
64D0000000|______________________|                |                      |
65CFFFFFFF|                      |                |                      | 
66        |    kernel seg_c      |==\             |                      |
67C0000000|______________________|   \            |______________________|
68BFFFFFFF|                      |  uncached      |                      |
69        |    kernel seg_b      |=====\=========>|       Registers      |
70B0000000|______________________|      \c        |______________________|
71AFFFFFFF|                      |       \a       |                      |
72        |                      |        \c      | FLASH/SRAM/Peripheral|
73        |                      |         \h     |______________________|
74        |                      |          \e    |                      |
75        |                      |           \d   |                      |
76        | kernel seg_0 - seg_a |            \==>|         DRAM         | 
77        |                      |                |        Cached        |
78        |                      |  paged to any  |                      |
79        |                      |    =======>    |______________________| 
80        |                      |                |                      |
81        |                      |                |        Illegal       |
82        |                      |                |______________________|
83        |                      |                |                      |      
84        |                      |                | FLASH/SRAM/Peripheral|
8500000000|______________________|                |______________________|
86
87In user-mode it looks the same except that only the space 0-AFFFFFFF is
88available. Therefore, in this model, the virtual address space per process
89is limited to 0xb0000000 bytes (minus 8192 bytes, since the first page,
900..8191, is never mapped, in order to trap NULL references).
91
92It also means that the total physical RAM that can be mapped is 256 MB
93(kseg_c above). More RAM can be mapped by choosing a different segmentation
94and shrinking the user-mode memory space.
95
96The MMU can map all 4 GB in user mode, but doing that would mean that a
97few extra instructions would be needed for each access to user mode
98memory.
99
100The kernel needs access to both cached and uncached flash. Uncached is
101necessary because of the special write/erase sequences. Also, the 
102peripherial chip-selects are decoded from that region.
103
104The kernel also needs its own virtual memory space. That is kseg_d. It
105is used by the vmalloc() kernel function to allocate virtual contiguous
106chunks of memory not possible using the normal kmalloc physical RAM 
107allocator.
108
109The setting of the actual MMU control registers to use this layout would
110be something like this:
111
112R_MMU_KSEG = ( ( seg_f, seg     ) |   // Flash cached
113               ( seg_e, seg     ) |   // Flash uncached
114               ( seg_d, page    ) |   // kernel vmalloc area    
115               ( seg_c, seg     ) |   // kernel linear segment
116               ( seg_b, seg     ) |   // kernel linear segment
117               ( seg_a, page    ) |
118               ( seg_9, page    ) |
119               ( seg_8, page    ) |
120               ( seg_7, page    ) |
121               ( seg_6, page    ) |
122               ( seg_5, page    ) |
123               ( seg_4, page    ) |
124               ( seg_3, page    ) |
125               ( seg_2, page    ) |
126               ( seg_1, page    ) |
127               ( seg_0, page    ) );
128
129R_MMU_KBASE_HI = ( ( base_f, 0x0 ) |   // flash/sram/periph cached
130                   ( base_e, 0x8 ) |   // flash/sram/periph uncached
131                   ( base_d, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
132                   ( base_c, 0x4 ) |   // physical RAM cached area
133                   ( base_b, 0xb ) |   // uncached on-chip registers
134                   ( base_a, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
135                   ( base_9, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
136                   ( base_8, 0x0 ) );  // don't care
137
138R_MMU_KBASE_LO = ( ( base_7, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
139                   ( base_6, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
140                   ( base_5, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
141                   ( base_4, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
142                   ( base_3, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
143                   ( base_2, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
144                   ( base_1, 0x0 ) |   // don't care
145                   ( base_0, 0x0 ) );  // don't care
146
147NOTE: while setting up the MMU, we run in a non-mapped mode in the DRAM (0x40
148segment) and need to setup the seg_4 to a unity mapping, so that we don't get
149a fault before we have had time to jump into the real kernel segment (0xc0). This
150is done in head.S temporarily, but fixed by the kernel later in paging_init.
151
152
153Paging - PTE's, PMD's and PGD's
154-------------------------------
155
156[ References: asm/pgtable.h, asm/page.h, asm/mmu.h ]
157
158The paging mechanism uses virtual addresses to split a process memory-space into
159pages, a page being the smallest unit that can be freely remapped in memory. On
160Linux/CRIS, a page is 8192 bytes (for technical reasons not equal to 4096 as in 
161most other 32-bit architectures). It would be inefficient to let a virtual memory
162mapping be controlled by a long table of page mappings, so it is broken down into
163a 2-level structure with a Page Directory containing pointers to Page Tables which
164each have maps of up to 2048 pages (8192 / sizeof(void *)). Linux can actually
165handle 3-level structures as well, with a Page Middle Directory in between, but
166in many cases, this is folded into a two-level structure by excluding the Middle
167Directory.
168
169We'll take a look at how an address is translated while we discuss how it's handled
170in the Linux kernel.
171
172The example address is 0xd004000c; in binary this is:
173
17431       23       15       7      0
17511010000 00000100 00000000 00001100
176
177|______| |__________||____________|
178  PGD        PTE       page offset
179
180Given the top-level Page Directory, the offset in that directory is calculated
181using the upper 8 bits:
182
183static inline pgd_t * pgd_offset(struct mm_struct * mm, unsigned long address)
184{
185	return mm->pgd + (address >> PGDIR_SHIFT);
186}
187
188PGDIR_SHIFT is the log2 of the amount of memory an entry in the PGD can map; in our
189case it is 24, corresponding to 16 MB. This means that each entry in the PGD 
190corresponds to 16 MB of virtual memory.
191
192The pgd_t from our example will therefore be the 208'th (0xd0) entry in mm->pgd.
193
194Since the Middle Directory does not exist, it is a unity mapping:
195
196static inline pmd_t * pmd_offset(pgd_t * dir, unsigned long address)
197{
198	return (pmd_t *) dir;
199}
200
201The Page Table provides the final lookup by using bits 13 to 23 as index:
202
203static inline pte_t * pte_offset(pmd_t * dir, unsigned long address)
204{
205	return (pte_t *) pmd_page(*dir) + ((address >> PAGE_SHIFT) &
206					   (PTRS_PER_PTE - 1));
207}
208
209PAGE_SHIFT is the log2 of the size of a page; 13 in our case. PTRS_PER_PTE is
210the number of pointers that fit in a Page Table and is used to mask off the 
211PGD-part of the address.
212
213The so-far unused bits 0 to 12 are used to index inside a page linearily.
214
215The VM system
216-------------
217
218The kernels own page-directory is the swapper_pg_dir, cleared in paging_init, 
219and contains the kernels virtual mappings (the kernel itself is not paged - it
220is mapped linearily using kseg_c as described above). Architectures without
221kernel segments like the i386, need to setup swapper_pg_dir directly in head.S
222to map the kernel itself. swapper_pg_dir is pointed to by init_mm.pgd as the
223init-task's PGD.
224
225To see what support functions are used to setup a page-table, let's look at the
226kernel's internal paged memory system, vmalloc/vfree.
227
228void * vmalloc(unsigned long size)
229
230The vmalloc-system keeps a paged segment in kernel-space at 0xd0000000. What
231happens first is that a virtual address chunk is allocated to the request using
232get_vm_area(size). After that, physical RAM pages are allocated and put into
233the kernel's page-table using alloc_area_pages(addr, size). 
234
235static int alloc_area_pages(unsigned long address, unsigned long size)
236
237First the PGD entry is found using init_mm.pgd. This is passed to
238alloc_area_pmd (remember the 3->2 folding). It uses pte_alloc_kernel to
239check if the PGD entry points anywhere - if not, a page table page is
240allocated and the PGD entry updated. Then the alloc_area_pte function is
241used just like alloc_area_pmd to check which page table entry is desired, 
242and a physical page is allocated and the table entry updated. All of this
243is repeated at the top-level until the entire address range specified has 
244been mapped.
245