Re: [PATCH 4/4] drm/nouveau: introduce CPU cache flushing macro

From: Lucas Stach
Date: Mon May 19 2014 - 05:23:34 EST


Am Montag, den 19.05.2014, 11:02 +0200 schrieb Thierry Reding:
> On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 04:10:58PM +0900, Alexandre Courbot wrote:
> > Some architectures (e.g. ARM) need the CPU buffers to be explicitely
> > flushed for a memory write to take effect. Not doing so results in
> > synchronization issues, especially after writing to BOs.
>
> It seems to me that the above is generally true for all architectures,
> not just ARM.
>
No, on PCI coherent arches, like x86 and some PowerPCs, the GPU will
snoop the CPU caches and therefore an explicit cache flush is not
required.

> Also: s/explicitely/explicitly/
>
> > This patch introduces a macro that flushes the caches on ARM and
> > translates to a no-op on other architectures, and uses it when
> > writing to in-memory BOs. It will also be useful for implementations of
> > instmem that access shared memory directly instead of going through
> > PRAMIN.
>
> Presumably instmem can access shared memory on all architectures, so
> this doesn't seem like a property of the architecture but rather of the
> memory pool backing the instmem.
>
> In that case I wonder if this shouldn't be moved into an operation that
> is implemented by the backing memory pool and be a noop where the cache
> doesn't need explicit flushing.
>
> > diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/core/os.h b/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/core/os.h
> > index d0ced94ca54c..274b4460bb03 100644
> > --- a/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/core/os.h
> > +++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/core/os.h
> > @@ -38,4 +38,21 @@
> > #endif /* def __BIG_ENDIAN else */
> > #endif /* !ioread32_native */
> >
> > +#if defined(__arm__)
> > +
> > +#define nv_cpu_cache_flush_area(va, size) \
> > +do { \
> > + phys_addr_t pa = virt_to_phys(va); \
> > + __cpuc_flush_dcache_area(va, size); \
> > + outer_flush_range(pa, pa + size); \
> > +} while (0)
>
> Couldn't this be a static inline function?
>
> > diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau_bo.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau_bo.c
> [...]
> > index 0886f47e5244..b9c9729c5733 100644
> > --- a/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau_bo.c
> > +++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau_bo.c
> > @@ -437,8 +437,10 @@ nouveau_bo_wr16(struct nouveau_bo *nvbo, unsigned index, u16 val)
> > mem = &mem[index];
> > if (is_iomem)
> > iowrite16_native(val, (void __force __iomem *)mem);
> > - else
> > + else {
> > *mem = val;
> > + nv_cpu_cache_flush_area(mem, 2);
> > + }
> > }
> >
> > u32
> > @@ -461,8 +463,10 @@ nouveau_bo_wr32(struct nouveau_bo *nvbo, unsigned index, u32 val)
> > mem = &mem[index];
> > if (is_iomem)
> > iowrite32_native(val, (void __force __iomem *)mem);
> > - else
> > + else {
> > *mem = val;
> > + nv_cpu_cache_flush_area(mem, 4);
> > + }
>
> This looks rather like a sledgehammer to me. Effectively this turns nvbo
> into an uncached buffer. With additional overhead of constantly flushing
> caches. Wouldn't it make more sense to locate the places where these are
> called and flush the cache after all the writes have completed?
>
I don't think the explicit flushing for those things makes sense. I
think it is a lot more effective to just map the BOs write-combined on
PCI non-coherent arches. This way any writes will be buffered. Reads
will be slow, but I don't think nouveau is reading back a lot from those
buffers.
Using the write-combining buffer doesn't need any additional
synchronization as it will get flushed on pushbuf kickoff anyways.

Regards,
Lucas
--
Pengutronix e.K. | Lucas Stach |
Industrial Linux Solutions | http://www.pengutronix.de/ |

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