[RFC 1/3] powerpc: __copy_tofrom_user tweaked for Cell

Paul Mackerras paulus at samba.org
Tue Jun 24 09:49:33 EST 2008


Gunnar von Boehn writes:

> Interesting points.
> Can you help me to understand where the negative effect of DCBZ does come
> from?

In my experience, dcbz slows down the hot-cache case because it adds a
few cycles to the execution time of the inner loop, and on most 64-bit
PowerPC implementations, it doesn't actually help even in the
cold-cache case because the store queue does enough write combining
that the cache doesn't end up reading the line from memory.  I don't
know whether the Cell PPE can do that, but I could believe that it
can't.

Paul.



More information about the Linuxppc-dev mailing list