Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu/hw mips_r4k.c

[Thiemo Seufer <ths@networkno.de>]

Fabrice Bellard wrote:
> Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> >Fabrice Bellard wrote:
> >
> >>CVSROOT:	/sources/qemu
> >>Module name:	qemu
> >>Branch: 	
> >>Changes by:	Fabrice Bellard <bellard@savannah.gnu.org>	06/05/02 
> >>22:18:28
> >>
> >>Modified files:
> >>	hw             : mips_r4k.c 
> >>
> >>Log message:
> >>	performance boost (on P4 hosts at least, rdtsc is a _very_ bad 
> >>	random generator)
> >>
> >>CVSWeb URLs:
> >>http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/qemu/qemu/hw/mips_r4k.c.diff?tr1=1.15&tr2=1.16&r1=text&r2=text
> >
> >
> >Does this really provide a measurable performance improvement?
> >Real hardware simply increments cp0_random together with the cycle
> >counter, this is randomized enough for TLB entry replacement.
> 
> Unfortunately, at least on my P4 PC it is not random enough: it is 
> always a multiple of two, so the number of TLBs is divided by two ! The 
> speed improvement is _very_ noticeable.
> 
> Your patch to accelerate tlb_flush_page() is still interesting, but I 
> would like to be sure that it does not reduce the speed of the x86 
> target. In particular, it could be possible to make it even faster by 
> reducing the size of the memset by using a smarter hash for tb_jmp_cache 
> (a few bit of the index could depend only on the memory page number).

As interim solution I moved it to mips specific code, I still don't
trust the MIPS TLB handling that much since it starts to fail once I
remove seemingly unnecessary flushes.

I still have nearly no time to work on qemu ATM. :-(


Thiemo