Re: [PATCH] efifb: allow user to disable write combined mapping.

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <b.zolnierkie@samsung.com>]

On Tuesday, July 25, 2017 10:56:15 AM Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 25, 2017 02:00:00 PM Dave Airlie wrote:
> > On 19 July 2017 at 00:34, Peter Jones <pjones@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 04:09:09PM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> > >> This patch allows the user to disable write combined mapping
> > >> of the efifb framebuffer console using an nowc option.
> > >>
> > >> A customer noticed major slowdowns while logging to the console
> > >> with write combining enabled, on other tasks running on the same
> > >> CPU. (10x or greater slow down on all other cores on the same CPU
> > >> as is doing the logging).
> > >>
> > >> I reproduced this on a machine with dual CPUs.
> > >> Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 v3 @ 1.90GHz (6 core)
> > >>
> > >> I wrote a test that just mmaps the pci bar and writes to it in
> > >> a loop, while this was running in the background one a single
> > >> core with (taskset -c 1), building a kernel up to init/version.o
> > >> (taskset -c 8) went from 13s to 133s or so. I've yet to explain
> > >> why this occurs or what is going wrong I haven't managed to find
> > >> a perf command that in any way gives insight into this.
> > >>
> > >>     11,885,070,715      instructions              #    1.39  insns per cycle
> > >> vs
> > >>     12,082,592,342      instructions              #    0.13  insns per cycle
> > >>
> > >> is the only thing I've spotted of interest, I've tried at least:
> > >> dTLB-stores,dTLB-store-misses,L1-dcache-stores,LLC-store,LLC-store-misses,LLC-load-misses,LLC-loads,\mem-loads,mem-stores,iTLB-loads,iTLB-load-misses,cache-references,cache-misses
> > >>
> > >> For now it seems at least a good idea to allow a user to disable write
> > >> combining if they see this until we can figure it out.
> > >
> > > Well, that's kind of amazing, given 3c004b4f7eab239e switched us /to/
> > > using ioremap_wc() for the exact same reason.  I'm not against letting
> > > the user force one way or the other if it helps, though it sure would be
> > > nice to know why.
> > >
> > > Anyway,
> > >
> > > Acked-By: Peter Jones <pjones@redhat.com>
> > >
> > > Bartlomiej, do you want to handle this in your devel tree?
> > 
> > I'm happy to stick this in a drm-fixes pull with this ack.
> 
> I'll put it into fbdev fixes for 4.13 with other fbdev patches.

Patch queued for 4.13, thanks.

Best regards,
--
Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
Samsung R&D Institute Poland
Samsung Electronics