[U-Boot] [PATCH v2] ext2: Cache line aligned partial sector bounce buffer
Mike Frysinger
vapier at gentoo.org
Tue Aug 23 20:32:38 CEST 2011
On Tuesday, August 23, 2011 13:58:01 Anton Staaf wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Monday, August 22, 2011 17:48:47 Anton Staaf wrote:
> >> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 2:42 PM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> >> > Anton Staaf wrote:
> >> >> Currently, if a device read request is done that does not begin or
> >> >> end on a sector boundary a stack allocated bounce buffer is used to
> >> >> perform the read, and then just the part of the sector that is
> >> >> needed is copied into the users buffer. This stack allocation can
> >> >> mean that the bounce buffer will not be aligned to the dcache line
> >> >> size. This is a problem when caches are enabled because unaligned
> >> >> cache invalidates are not safe.
> >> >>
> >> >> This patch allocates a cache line size aligned sector sized bounce
> >> >> buffer the first time that ext2fs_devread is called.
> >> >
> >> > ...and never frees ist, which is a bad thing. Please fix.
> >>
> >> That was actually intentional. To free the buffer the code would need
> >> to know when it was done doing ext2 accesses. This information isn't
> >> really available. And it would be a performance hit to allocate and
> >> free the buffer every time a read was performed, instead this patch
> >> re-uses the same allocated buffer every time that the read is called.
> >> Would you prefer that I allocate and free the buffer each time? I can
> >> see an argument for that since it would mean that the code could also
> >> be called from multiple threads simultaneously, not that we have any
> >> such thing to worry about at the moment.
> >
> > i'm not sure i follow ... the current code always frees it upon func
> > exit. why cant yours do the same ?
>
> I certainly could. But as I mentioned it would be a performance hit
> to do so. The devread function is called many times. And there is no
> way of knowing when the last one finishes. And since it's likely that
> a kernel will be loaded shortly it seems better to be fast than to
> free this buffer. But I would be happy to change this if people
> disagree (which it sounds like they do). An alternative would be to
> allocate the buffer the first time it is needed in the devread
> function and then free it in the ext2fs_close function. Or if we know
> that ext2fs_mount will always be called first we could allocate the
> buffer there.
and what do you do when there is no memory left in the malloc arena because
you leaked it all and so can't service any new read requests ?
if the malloc performance is poor, then why not fix that ?
-mike
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