Subject: Re: 2GB address space limit on 32-bit PowerPC Macintosh

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 02:42:05 +1000

> The PMac is only one "board" out of many we support, and I don't think
> it should be considered the default or generic configuration any more
> than any other board.  The PMac is the easiest to update because it's
> a single configuration file. 

Single ? Hrm... not so sure :) It's also the biggest (in terms of line
of code) subarch of the ppc32 architecture :) Besides, pmac is also chrp
& prep as I'm really talking about CONFIG_PPC_MULTIPLATFORM (too bad no
embedded vendor ever tried to be part of the common kernel... heh)

>  If you want that to have a 3G default task
> space, then update that one configuration file.  

Hrm... you mean the defconfig then ? Ok, right, well, I suppose we could
update pmac, prep and chrp defconfigs. It's still not the default as per
Kconfig which I find a little bit annoying. 

> As we have time we
> will update all of the others, and when we get to the point where most
> boards are of that configuration, we'll make it the default and the
> minority of boards become the special cases.

On the other hands, how many embedded boards care about getting the
latest "linus" tree ? I mean, I do have to update pmac support regulary
as new developpement occurs, and you know as well as I do that 2.6.x
series are by no mean stable. Embedded code has been rather frozen in
the rock, I don't think it's much to ask from the appropriate maintainer
to have a quick look at possibly upgrading their board support as well.
And it isn't a difficult change for most 6xx/7xx/7xxx based boards
anyway. What I'm worried about is that without some "pressure" (like
breaking them), it will simply never be fixed...

The whole io_block_mapping() was a bad idea in the first place. We
introduced that API to replace an even worse one which was to set BATs
directly in the early days of the kernel, but I for one think we should
just have killed the whole thing in the first place.

Ben.