[PATCHv2 1/3] ARM: Translate delay.S into (mostly) C

Nicolas Pitre nico at fluxnic.net
Wed Nov 3 22:40:14 EDT 2010


On Wed, 3 Nov 2010, Daniel Walker wrote:

> On Thu, 2010-10-28 at 14:19 -0700, Stephen Boyd wrote:
> > We want to allow machines to override the __delay() implementation
> > at runtime so they can use a timer based __delay() routine. It's
> > easier to do this using C, so let's write udelay and friends in C.
> > 
> > We lose the #if 0 code, which according to Russell is used "to
> > make the delay loop more stable and predictable on older CPUs"
> > (see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/888867 for more
> > info). We shouldn't be too worried though, since we'll soon add
> > functionality allowing a machine to set the __delay() loop
> > themselves, thus allowing machines to resurrect the commented out
> > code should they need it.
> > 
> > Nico expressed concern that fixed lpj cmdlines will break due to
> > compiler optimizations. That doesn't seem to be the case since
> > before and after this patch I get the same lpj value when running
> > my CPU at 19.2 MHz. That should be sufficiently slow enough to
> > cover any machine running Linux.
> 
> Nico, are you ready to sign off on this?

Acked-by: Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre at linaro.org>

The compiled code looks trivial enough.  I don't think gcc will find 
ways to optimize it further.  And if gcc regresses then the delay would 
just be longer.


Nicolas



More information about the linux-arm-kernel mailing list