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Phasing out MTRR use
-MTRR use is replaced on modern x86 hardware with PAT. Over time the only type
-of effective MTRR that is expected to be supported will be for write-combining.
-As MTRR use is phased out device drivers should use arch_phys_wc_add() to make
-MTRR effective on non-PAT systems while a no-op on PAT enabled systems.
+MTRR use is replaced on modern x86 hardware with PAT. Direct MTRR use by
+drivers on Linux is now completely phased out, device drivers should use
+arch_phys_wc_add() in combination with ioremap_wc() to make MTRR effective on
+non-PAT systems while a no-op but equally effective on PAT enabled systems.
+
+Even if Linux does not use MTRRs directly, some x86 platform firmware may still
+set up MTRRs early before booting the OS. They do this as some platform
+firmware may still have implemented access to MTRRs which would be controlled
+and handled by the platform firmware directly. An example of platform use of
+MTRRs is through the use of SMI handlers, one case could be for fan control,
+the platform code would need uncachable access to some of its fan control
+registers. Such platform access does not need any Operating System MTRR code in
+place other than mtrr_type_lookup() to ensure any OS specific mapping requests
+are aligned with platform MTRR setup. If MTRRs are only set up by the platform
+firmware code though and the OS does not make any specific MTRR mapping
+requests mtrr_type_lookup() should always return MTRR_TYPE_INVALID.
For details refer to Documentation/x86/pat.txt.
projects / karo-tx-linux.git / blobdiff