On Fri, 3 Aug 2018, David Laight wrote:
> From: Ard Biesheuvel
> > Sent: 03 August 2018 10:30
> ...
> > The discussion about whether memcpy() should rely on unaligned
> > accesses, and whether you should use it on device memory is orthogonal
> > to that, and not the heart of the matter IMO
>
> Even on x86 using memcpy() on PCIe memory (maybe mmap()ed into userspace)
> isn't a good idea.
> In the kernel memcpy_to/fromio() ought to be a better choice but that
> is just an alternate name for memcpy().
>
> The problem on x86 is that memcpy() is likely to be implemented as
> 'rep movsb' on modern cpu - relying on the cpu hardware to perform
> cache-line sized transfers (etc).
> Unfortunately on uncached locations it has to revert to byte copies.
> So PCIe transfers (especially reads) are very slow.
>
> The transfers need to use the largest size register available.
>
> David
On x86, the framebuffer is mapped as write-combining memory type, so "rep
movsb" could merge the byte writes to larger chunks. I don't have a cpu
with the ERMS feature - could anyone try it if rep movsb works worse or
better than explicit writes to the framebuffer?
Mikulas
