From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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Subject: Re: performance: memcpy vs. __copy_tofrom_user
From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
To: Scott Wood <scottwood@freescale.com>
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Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 09:32:07 +1100
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Cc: linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org, Dominik Bozek <domino@mikroswiat.pl>,
	linuxppc-embedded@ozlabs.org
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On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 12:40 -0500, Scott Wood wrote:
> 
> The performance difference most likely comes from the fact that copy 
> to/from user can assume that the memory is cacheable, while memcpy is 
> occasionally used on cache-inhibited memory -- so dcbz isn't used.  We 
> may be better off handling the alignment fault on those occasions, and 
> we should use dcba on chips that support it.

Note that the kernel memcpy isn't supposed to be used for non-cacheable
memory. That's what memcpy_to/fromio are for.

But Paul has a point that for small copies especially, the cost of
the cache instructions outweigh their benefit.

Cheers,
Ben.