[PATCH] powerpc: reduce number of WATCHDOG_RESET calls from flush_cache

Rasmus Villemoes rasmus.villemoes at prevas.dk
Thu Jun 4 11:30:39 CEST 2020


Calling WATCHDOG_RESET for each and every cache line is overkill.

In our case, the kernel image is a little over 7MB, and the almost
500000 calls of WATCHDOG_RESET() adds about one second to the
boottime.

I very highly doubt there's any real hardware where flushing 64K
from cache to memory takes more than a few milliseconds, so this
should be completely safe. Since it reduces the number of
WATCHDOG_RESET() calls by roughly a factor of 1000, the overhead from
those is practically eliminated. (Just in case the range flushed is so
small that it doesn't cross a 64K boundary, add a single
WATCHDOG_RESET() between the loops).

64K is chosen because that's also the default chunk size used by the
hashing algorithms, and when, say, a sha256 digest of a kernel image of
a few MB is being verified, that's almost guaranteed to be cache-cold,
so apart from the computations being done, the hashing is also bounded
by memory speed - so if 64K works for those cases, it should certainly
also work when memory access is the only thing being done.

Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <rasmus.villemoes at prevas.dk>
---
 arch/powerpc/lib/cache.c | 8 ++++++--
 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/powerpc/lib/cache.c b/arch/powerpc/lib/cache.c
index 528361e972..df2310f4e2 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/lib/cache.c
+++ b/arch/powerpc/lib/cache.c
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@
 #include <cpu_func.h>
 #include <asm/cache.h>
 #include <watchdog.h>
+#include <linux/sizes.h>
 
 void flush_cache(ulong start_addr, ulong size)
 {
@@ -21,15 +22,18 @@ void flush_cache(ulong start_addr, ulong size)
 	for (addr = start; (addr <= end) && (addr >= start);
 			addr += CONFIG_SYS_CACHELINE_SIZE) {
 		asm volatile("dcbst 0,%0" : : "r" (addr) : "memory");
-		WATCHDOG_RESET();
+		if ((addr & (SZ_64K - 1)) == 0)
+			WATCHDOG_RESET();
 	}
 	/* wait for all dcbst to complete on bus */
 	asm volatile("sync" : : : "memory");
+	WATCHDOG_RESET();
 
 	for (addr = start; (addr <= end) && (addr >= start);
 			addr += CONFIG_SYS_CACHELINE_SIZE) {
 		asm volatile("icbi 0,%0" : : "r" (addr) : "memory");
-		WATCHDOG_RESET();
+		if ((addr & (SZ_64K - 1)) == 0)
+			WATCHDOG_RESET();
 	}
 	asm volatile("sync" : : : "memory");
 	/* flush prefetch queue */
-- 
2.23.0



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