RE: memcpy and prefetch

["David VomLehn (dvomlehn)" <dvomlehn@cisco.com>]

> The idea here is that we have two issues with prefetching:
> 
>  o Prefetching beyond the end of the source or destination range on a
>    in-coherent range might bring back stale values from a DMA I/O
>    buffer resulting in data corruption.  Hardware DMA coherency will
>    avoid this issue.
> 
>  o IP27 has full blown hardware coherency.  Historically 
> CONFIG_DMA_COHERENT
>    was not able to cope with something of the complexity of IP27, so
>    there was a separate CONFIG_DMA_IP27 and the broken logic 
> expression
>    was meant to treat CONFIG_DMA_COHERENT and CONFIG_DMA_IP27 the same
>    as for prefetching.
> 
>  o Prefetching beyond the end of physical memory can cause 
> exceptions on
>    some systems.  The Malta has this problem.
> 
> Thus no prefetching on Malta or non-coherent systems.
> 
>   Ralf

It seems to me as though we could avoid the first and third problems
with a memcpy that doesn't prefetch past the end of the buffer, the
thought being that if we are reading or writing a memory region, we
really shouldn't be doing DMA to or from that location. This would
probably be slightly suboptimal, performance-wise, for those systems
that do have DMA coherence. It seems as though we could have two
mutually exclusive versions, selectable via the CONFIG_DMA_COHERENT
flag. For those of us without DMA coherence, it would probably give our
memcpy performance a bit of a kick in the pants over using no prefetch
at all.

If this makes sense, we might be able to sign up to do the work. Anyone
have a good, caching-aware memcpy test?
--
David VomLehn, dvomlehn@cisco.com