[PATCH 21/21]: powerpc/cell spidernet DMA coalescing

Geoff Levand geoffrey.levand at am.sony.com
Wed Oct 11 11:46:08 EST 2006


jschopp wrote:
> Linas Vepstas wrote:
>> The current driver code performs 512 DMA mappns of a bunch of 
>> 32-byte structures. This is silly, as they are all in contiguous 
>> memory. Ths patch changes the code to DMA map the entie area
>> with just one call.
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Linas Vepstas <linas at austin.ibm.com>
>> Cc: James K Lewis <jklewis at us.ibm.com>
>> Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de>
> 
> The others look good, but this one complicates the code and doesn't have any benefit.  20 
> for 21 isn't bad.

Linas, 

Is the motivation for this change to improve performance by reducing the overhead
of the mapping calls?  If so, there may be some benefit for some systems.  Could
you please elaborate?

-Geoff




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