+1

On Tue, 26 Jul 2016 09:11:49 -0500 Timur Tabi  wrote:

Will Deacon wrote:

quoted

The kernel really needs to support both of those platforms :/

For the memory-mapped counter registers, the architecture says:

   `If the implementation supports 64-bit atomic accesses, then the
    CNTV_CVAL register must be accessible as an atomic 64-bit value.'

which is borderline tautological. If we take the generous reading that
this means AArch64 CPUs can use readq (and I'm not completely
comfortable with that assertion, particularly as you say that it breaks
the model), then you still need to use readq_relaxed here to avoid a
DSB. Furthermore, what are you going to do for AArch32? readq doesn't
exist over there, and if you use the generic implementation then it's
not atomic. In which case, we end up with the current code, as well as a
readq_relaxed guarded by a questionable #ifdef that is known to break a
supported platform for an unknown performance improvement. Hardly a big
win.  

I know Fu dropped this patch, and I don't want to kick a dead horse, but 
I was wondering if it would be okay to do this:

static u64 arch_counter_get_cntvct_mem(void)
{
#ifdef readq_relaxed
	return readq_relaxed(arch_counter_base + CNTVCT_LO);
#else
	u32 vct_lo, vct_hi, tmp_hi;

	do {
		vct_hi = readl_relaxed(arch_counter_base + CNTVCT_HI);
		vct_lo = readl_relaxed(arch_counter_base + CNTVCT_LO);
		tmp_hi = readl_relaxed(arch_counter_base + CNTVCT_HI);
	} while (vct_hi != tmp_hi);

	return ((u64) vct_hi << 32) | vct_lo;
#endif
}

readq and readq_relaxed are defined in arch/arm64/include/asm/io.h.  Why 
would the function exist if AArch64 CPUs can't use it?

+1

I measured the performance on berlin arm64 platforms:

compared with original version, using readq_relaxed could reduce
time of arch_counter_get_cntvct_mem() by about 42%!

Thanks,
Jisheng