Re: memcpy and prefetch

[Michael Sundius <msundius@cisco.com>]

David Daney wrote:
> Michael Sundius wrote:
>> I know this topic has been written about but so excuse me if I am 
>> redundant.
>> I saw lots of talk in the archives but I don't know if a solution was 
>> ever arrived
>> at. so:
>>
>> what is the current state of the use of prefetch in memcpy()? it 
>> seems that
>> it is #undef-ed if CONFIG_DMA_COHERENT is not turned on.
>>
>> is this still because the memcpy does not check to prevent a prefetch of
>> addresses beyond the end of the buffer?
>>
>> If so, what was the reason a solution was abandoned....
>>
>> also  has anyone out there written a memcopy that does use prefetch
>> intelligently (for mips32 that is)?
>>
>
> The Cavium OCTEON port overrides the default memcpy and does use 
> prefetch.  It was recently merged (2.6.29-rc2).  Look at octeon-memcpy.S
>
> I have thought that memcpy could be generated by mm/page.c as 
> copy_page and clear_page are.
>
> David Daney
David,

thanks!!! that's really useful. I have a few questions tho:

1) So you made this function explicitly for the Octeon. and that is 
because you know the cache-line is 128 bytes long
on the octeon? is that right?

2) It seems as though you always prefectch the first cache line..  what 
happens if the memcopy is less than 1 cache line long?
wouldn't you risk prefetching beyond the end of the buffer?

3) why do you only do the "pref   0 offset(src)" and not a prefetch for 
the destination?

4) on line 244 you check to see if len is less than 128. while on the 
other checks you check for (offset)+1
why would you not do the prefetch if len was exactly 256 bytes? (or 128 
in the case of line 196)?

thanks.





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