On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 04:41:17PM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
I think let's start out by killing this function - the semantics of this function have been lost, so it's not clear what it was supposed to do in its original form. Even going back to the start of git history, it looks like it was never used outside arch code.
I floated a patch to remove flush_icache_user_range() to the architecture maintainers, giving the background to how this came about. I received the following reply from David Miller:
ptrace() accesses (via __access_remote_vm()) already use an existing helper function for these sorts of situations, in the form of copy_{to,from}_user_page(). I would suggest that uprobes uses that as well.
I think this is a very valid point, and echo's my point.