Re: [PATCH v2 00/17] Refactor fw_devlink to significantly improve boot time

Tomi Valkeinen
2020-11-24T08:30:27Z

Hi,

On 21/11/2020 04:02, Saravana Kannan wrote:
> The current implementation of fw_devlink is very inefficient because it
> tries to get away without creating fwnode links in the name of saving
> memory usage. Past attempts to optimize runtime at the cost of memory
> usage were blocked with request for data showing that the optimization
> made significant improvement for real world scenarios.
>
> We have those scenarios now. There have been several reports of boot
> time increase in the order of seconds in this thread [1]. Several OEMs
> and SoC manufacturers have also privately reported significant
> (350-400ms) increase in boot time due to all the parsing done by
> fw_devlink.
>
> So this patch series refactors fw_devlink to be more efficient. The key
> difference now is the addition of support for fwnode links -- just a few
> simple APIs. This also allows most of the code to be moved out of
> firmware specific (DT mostly) code into driver core.
>
> This brings the following benefits:
> - Instead of parsing the device tree multiple times (complexity was
> close to O(N^3) where N in the number of properties) during bootup,
> fw_devlink parses each fwnode node/property only once and creates
> fwnode links. The rest of the fw_devlink code then just looks at these
> fwnode links to do rest of the work.
>
> - Makes it much easier to debug probe issue due to fw_devlink in the
> future. fw_devlink=on blocks the probing of devices if they depend on
> a device that hasn't been added yet. With this refactor, it'll be very
> easy to tell what that device is because we now have a reference to
> the fwnode of the device.
>
> - Much easier to add fw_devlink support to ACPI and other firmware
> types. A refactor to move the common bits from DT specific code to
> driver core was in my TODO list as a prerequisite to adding ACPI
> support to fw_devlink. This series gets that done.
>
> Laurent and Grygorii tested the v1 series and they saw boot time
> improvment of about 12 seconds and 3 seconds, respectively.

Tested v2 on OMAP4 SDP. With my particular config, boot time to starting init went from 18.5 seconds
to 12.5 seconds.

Tomi

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