[U-Boot] [PATCH v2] ext2: Cache line aligned partial sector bounce buffer

[Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>]

On Tuesday, August 23, 2011 13:58:01 Anton Staaf wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Monday, August 22, 2011 17:48:47 Anton Staaf wrote:
> >> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 2:42 PM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> >> > Anton Staaf wrote:
> >> >> Currently, if a device read request is done that does not begin or
> >> >> end on a sector boundary a stack allocated bounce buffer is used to
> >> >> perform the read, and then just the part of the sector that is
> >> >> needed is copied into the users buffer.  This stack allocation can
> >> >> mean that the bounce buffer will not be aligned to the dcache line
> >> >> size.  This is a problem when caches are enabled because unaligned
> >> >> cache invalidates are not safe.
> >> >> 
> >> >> This patch allocates a cache line size aligned sector sized bounce
> >> >> buffer the first time that ext2fs_devread is called.
> >> > 
> >> > ...and never frees ist, which is a bad thing.  Please fix.
> >> 
> >> That was actually intentional.  To free the buffer the code would need
> >> to know when it was done doing ext2 accesses.  This information isn't
> >> really available.  And it would be a performance hit to allocate and
> >> free the buffer every time a read was performed, instead this patch
> >> re-uses the same allocated buffer every time that the read is called.
> >> Would you prefer that I allocate and free the buffer each time?  I can
> >> see an argument for that since it would mean that the code could also
> >> be called from multiple threads simultaneously, not that we have any
> >> such thing to worry about at the moment.
> > 
> > i'm not sure i follow ... the current code always frees it upon func
> > exit. why cant yours do the same ?
> 
> I certainly could.  But as I mentioned it would be a performance hit
> to do so.  The devread function is called many times.  And there is no
> way of knowing when the last one finishes.  And since it's likely that
> a kernel will be loaded shortly it seems better to be fast than to
> free this buffer.  But I would be happy to change this if people
> disagree (which it sounds like they do).  An alternative would be to
> allocate the buffer the first time it is needed in the devread
> function and then free it in the ext2fs_close function.  Or if we know
> that ext2fs_mount will always be called first we could allocate the
> buffer there.

and what do you do when there is no memory left in the malloc arena because 
you leaked it all and so can't service any new read requests ?

if the malloc performance is poor, then why not fix that ?
-mike
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