RE: lmw and stmw instructions not used copy functions
From: Joakim Tjernlund <hidden>
Date: 2003-02-21 08:31:49
From: Joakim Tjernlund <hidden>
Date: 2003-02-21 08:31:49
Joakim Tjernlund wrote:quoted
I noticed that the lmw and stmw instructions are not used in copy_page(), clear_page() etc. Aren't these instructions faster than a bunch of lwz/stw?Motorola doesn't guarantee these are any faster, and most documentation indicates they are likely to be slower. If you look closely, you may notice that not too many places can utilize these instructions, and often the load or store is done to take advantages of some pipeline optimizations with comparisons to values in well known registers.
Did some crude benchmarking using clear_page() as my test function. I made a version that uses stmw and compared that with the orginal clear_page(). Result: The stmw version was much slower. When I increased the number of bytes to copy per loop to 32, it became as fast as the orginal. Jocke ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/