[PATCH] arm: mm: refactor v7 cache cleaning ops to use way/index sequence

[catalin.marinas@arm.com (Catalin Marinas)]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 04:58:58PM +0000, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Nov 2013, Lorenzo Pieralisi wrote:
> 
> > Set-associative caches on all v7 implementations map the index bits
> > to physical addresses LSBs and tag bits to MSBs. On most systems with
> > sane DRAM controller configurations, this means that the current v7
> > cache flush routine using set/way operations triggers a DRAM memory
> > controller precharge/activate for every cache line writeback since the
> > cache routine cleans lines by first fixing the index and then looping
> > through ways.
> > 
> > Given the random content of cache tags, swapping the order between
> > indexes and ways loops do not prevent DRAM pages precharge and
> > activate cycles but at least, on average, improves the chances that
> > either multiple lines hit the same page or multiple lines belong to
> > different DRAM banks, improving throughput significantly.
> > 
> > This patch swaps the inner loops in the v7 cache flushing routine to
> > carry out the clean operations first on all sets belonging to a given
> > way (looping through sets) and then decrementing the way.
> > 
> > Benchmarks showed that by swapping the ordering in which sets and ways
> > are decremented in the v7 cache flushing routine, that uses set/way
> > operations, time required to flush caches is reduced significantly,
> > owing to improved writebacks throughput to the DRAM controller.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Pieralisi <lorenzo.pieralisi@arm.com>
> 
> Could you include some benchmark results so we have an idea of the 
> expected improvement scale?

Lorenzo should have some numbers.

It was initially raised by the hardware people and the ARM ARM was
changed in this respect between revB and revC.

-- 
Catalin