• Helge Deller's avatar
    parisc: Add alternative coding infrastructure · 3847dab7
    Helge Deller authored
    This patch adds the necessary code to patch a running kernel at runtime
    to improve performance.
    
    The current implementation offers a few optimizations variants:
    
    - When running a SMP kernel on a single UP processor, unwanted assembler
      statements like locking functions are overwritten with NOPs. When
      multiple instructions shall be skipped, one branch instruction is used
      instead of multiple nop instructions.
    
    - In the UP case, some pdtlb and pitlb instructions are patched to
      become pdtlb,l and pitlb,l which only flushes the CPU-local tlb
      entries instead of broadcasting the flush to other CPUs in the system
      and thus may improve performance.
    
    - fic and fdc instructions are skipped if no I- or D-caches are
      installed.  This should speed up qemu emulation and cacheless systems.
    
    - If no cache coherence is needed for IO operations, the relevant fdc
      and sync instructions in the sba and ccio drivers are replaced by
      nops.
    
    - On systems which share I- and D-TLBs and thus don't have a seperate
      instruction TLB, the pitlb instruction is replaced by a nop.
    
    Live-patching is done early in the boot process, just after having run
    the system inventory. No drivers are running and thus no external
    interrupts should arrive. So the hope is that no TLB exceptions will
    occur during the patching. If this turns out to be wrong we will
    probably need to do the patching in real-mode.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHelge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
    3847dab7
alternative.h 1.35 KB