Re: [PATCH 0/4] arm64: an optimization for AmpereOne

[Mark Rutland]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 09:48:57AM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 05:28:51PM +0800, Huang Shijie wrote:
> > 0) Background:
> >    We found that AmpereOne benefits from aggressive prefetches when
> >    using 4K page size.
> 
> We tend to shy away from micro-architecture specific optimisations in
> the arm64 kernel as they're pretty unmaintainable, hard to test properly,
> generally lead to bloat and add additional obstacles to updating our
> library routines.
> 
> Admittedly, we have something for Thunder-X1 in copy_page() (disguised
> as ARM64_HAS_NO_HW_PREFETCH) but, frankly, that machine needed all the
> help it could get and given where it is today I suspect we could drop
> that code without any material consequences.
> 
> So I'd really prefer not to merge this; modern CPUs should do better at
> copying data. It's copy_to_user(), not rocket science.

I agree, and I'd also like to drop ARM64_HAS_NO_HW_PREFETCH.

Mark.