Acceleration for map_copy_from on powerpc 512x

Fortini Matteo Matteo.Fortini at mta.it
Thu Oct 15 12:02:26 EDT 2009


Hi,
I'm working on a powerpc (PPC512x) embedded Linux product, and while I was trying to improve boot time, I found I could exploit the hw in order to speed up reading from NOR flashes.
The Linux/mtd version we're using is 2.6.24.6+Freescale patches.
Basically, I needed to hack the map_copy_from, which for my arch and uncached areas translates to a memcpy, in order to use the SCLPC FIFO, with a performance benefit of >2x on aligned multiple of 32Bytes transfers.

I didn't find a cleaner way than just #ifdef'ing the map_copy_from call and substitute with my call on relevant cases. I wonder if there is a cleaner way.

And yes, as soon as I've cleaned up the code a little bit, I will definitely post a patch about it.

Moreover: a huge benefit would come from exploiting DMA on these transfers, but I found I'm in_atomic while doing map_copy_from... is there an alternative way of locking than just disabling preemption?
I know maybe a newer kernel has already fixed it, but we're kind of stuck with the old one since we don't have time to port all of our device drivers to 2.6.3x

Thanks,
Matteo


More information about the linux-mtd mailing list