[SLOF] [PATCH 0/4] Accelerate the screen drawing functions

[Thomas Huth]

While working on the cursor drawing issues, I've noticed that
some other functions in the framebuffer code of SLOF could be
accelerated quite a bit. The first two patches are rather
cosmetic and do not contribute much to the speed improvement,
but the last two patches speed up the drawing quite a lot!

There are two core functions, MRMOVE and RFILL, which are used
by the drawing functions to write to the framebuffer and which
were not really adapted to the KVMPPC_H_LOGICAL_MEMOP of
board-qemu yet (i.e. they were written with js2x in mind).
So they both triggered a hypercall for every 8-byte access
to the framebuffer instead of handling larger transfers at
once. By implementing a proper accelerated version of these
calls, the text drawing and screen-erasing can be speed-up
quite a bit:

- Fixing MRMOVE improves the character drawing by factor 2
  or more (the "benchmark" that I've published in my
  cover-letter of the cursor-improvement series earlier
  this week now only takes 0.3 s instead of 0.8 s!)

- Fixing RFILL improves the screen erasing function by
  factor 10 or even more! The function "erase-screen"
  took approx. 1.3 s before the fix, and now only takes
  0.1 s after the fix.

Both fixes also speed up grub in graphical mode quite a bit,
since grub apparently uses the firmware to erase the screen.

Something to consider: In the RFILL patch, I am first filling
a temporary buffer with the pattern and then using this
buffer as a parameter to the KVMPPC_H_LOGICAL_MEMOP copy
function (i.e. by calling the _FASTMRMOVE macro). We could
also extend the KVMPPC_H_LOGICAL_MEMOP to directly provide
a "memset" sub-function instead. This could result in some
more few percents of speed improvement, but I am not sure
whether this is still worth the effort and circumstances
(newer SLOF versions would not be compatible with older
versions of QEMU anymore). What do you think?

Thomas Huth (4):
  terminal: Disable the terminal-write trace by default
  fbuffer: Precalculate line length in bytes
  fbuffer: Implement MRMOVE as an accelerated primitive
  fbuffer: Implement RFILL as an accelerated primitive

 include/ppc970/cache.h | 40 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 include/ppcp7/cache.h  | 14 +++++++++++++
 slof/fs/base.fs        |  2 --
 slof/fs/fbuffer.fs     | 25 +++++++++++++-----------
 slof/fs/rmove.fs       | 53 --------------------------------------------------
 slof/fs/terminal.fs    |  3 ++-
 slof/prim.code         | 13 +++++++++++++
 slof/prim.in           |  3 ++-
 8 files changed, 85 insertions(+), 68 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 slof/fs/rmove.fs

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1.8.3.1