Andrew Morton wrote: > I really dislike the term "flush". Sometimes it means writeback, > sometimes it means invalidate. Perhaps at other times it means > both. > > Can we please be very clear in comments and changelogs about exactly > what this "flush" does. With bonus points for being more specific in the > function naming? >
That's a good point, "flush" has been cargo-culted along in Linux's cache management APIs to mean write-back-and-invalidate. In this case I think this API is purely about invalidate. It just so happens that x86 has not historically had a global invalidate instruction readily available which leads to the overuse of wbinvd. It would be nice to make clear that this API is purely about invalidating any data cached for a physical address impacted by address space management event (secure erase / new region provision). Write-back is an unnecessary side-effect. So how about: s/arch_flush_memregion/cpu_cache_invalidate_memregion/?
