RE: framebuffer corruption due to overlapping stp instructions on arm64

Mikulas Patocka
2018-08-08T14:21:51Z

On Tue, 7 Aug 2018, David Laight wrote:

> From: Mikulas Patocka
> > Sent: 07 August 2018 15:07
> ...
> > Unaccelerated scrolling is still painfully slow
> > even on modern computers because of slow framebuffer read.
>
> I solved that many years ago on a strongarm system by mapping
> the screen memory at two separate virtual addresses.
> One uncached used for writes, the second cached using the
> 'minicache' for reads.
> (and immediately fell foul of a memcpy() function that compared
> the two virtual addresses and decided to copy backwards)
>
> I suspect some modern cpus don't like you doing that and the
> graphics 'drivers' won't use different mappings.

Intel says that you can't mix PAT memory attributes - but the non-temporal
store instructions use write-combining semantics on a memory that is
normally cacheable - and it is allowed to mix non-temporal stores with
other cacheable memory accesses - so I believe that the CPU will snoop the
cache for wc accesses and handle the conflict.

> Even in glibc you want a more general copy_to/from_io_memory()
> rather than just 'copy_from_framebuffer()'.
> Best to define both - even if they end up identical.
> Other drivers allow PCIe space be mmap()ed into user space.
>
> While your tests show vmovntdqa being slightly slower than an
> avx read for uncached mappings it is still much better than
> all the other options.

Tihs was a measuring glitch - movntdqa is as fast as movdqa on non-cached
mappings.

Mikulas

> David
>
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