• Evan Green's avatar
    RISC-V: Probe for unaligned access speed · 584ea656
    Evan Green authored
    Rather than deferring unaligned access speed determinations to a vendor
    function, let's probe them and find out how fast they are. If we
    determine that an unaligned word access is faster than N byte accesses,
    mark the hardware's unaligned access as "fast". Otherwise, we mark
    accesses as slow.
    
    The algorithm itself runs for a fixed amount of jiffies. Within each
    iteration it attempts to time a single loop, and then keeps only the best
    (fastest) loop it saw. This algorithm was found to have lower variance from
    run to run than my first attempt, which counted the total number of
    iterations that could be done in that fixed amount of jiffies. By taking
    only the best iteration in the loop, assuming at least one loop wasn't
    perturbed by an interrupt, we eliminate the effects of interrupts and
    other "warm up" factors like branch prediction. The only downside is it
    depends on having an rdtime granular and accurate enough to measure a
    single copy. If we ever manage to complete a loop in 0 rdtime ticks, we
    leave the unaligned setting at UNKNOWN.
    
    There is a slight change in user-visible behavior here. Previously, all
    boards except the THead C906 reported misaligned access speed of
    UNKNOWN. C906 reported FAST. With this change, since we're now measuring
    misaligned access speed on each hart, all RISC-V systems will have this
    key set as either FAST or SLOW.
    
    Currently, we don't have a way to confidently measure the difference between
    SLOW and EMULATED, so we label anything not fast as SLOW. This will
    mislabel some systems that are actually EMULATED as SLOW. When we get
    support for delegating misaligned access traps to the kernel (as opposed
    to the firmware quietly handling it), we can explicitly test in Linux to
    see if unaligned accesses trap. Those systems will start to report
    EMULATED, though older (today's) systems without that new SBI mechanism
    will continue to report SLOW.
    
    I've updated the documentation for those hwprobe values to reflect
    this, specifically: SLOW may or may not be emulated by software, and FAST
    represents means being faster than equivalent byte accesses. The change
    in documentation is accurate with respect to both the former and current
    behavior.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEvan Green <evan@rivosinc.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarConor Dooley <conor.dooley@microchip.com>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230818194136.4084400-2-evan@rivosinc.comSigned-off-by: default avatarPalmer Dabbelt <palmer@rivosinc.com>
    584ea656
copy-unaligned.h 385 Bytes