RE: fsl booke MM vs. SMP questions
flat view
From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Date: 2007-05-28 09:24:22
On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 17:05 +0800, Liu Dave-r63238 wrote:
Ben,quoted
You never "loose" IPIs in the sense that you always get at least 1 interrupt for N IPIs and it's up to software to make sure not to lose any event. The linux kernel arch code usually handles that with a synchronous IPI mecanism.Due to the synchronous IPI mechanism for TLB invalidatation, it is very time exhausting, there are interrupt overhead and wait time for sync.
Yup, there is, though you can try to optimize it such that you only sync the CPUs involved with the IPIs, which often are only few.
I also noticed that tlb invalidation on the PowerPC 750 SMP system is using the IPI mechanism, that is because the 750 can not broadcast tlb invalidation ops.
Do we support that in linux ?
If the broadcast tlbivax instruction is more effective than the IPI mechanism? Did you evaluate the performance with the two different ways?
Not really... it depends on bus traffic, plus the need to spinlock the broadcast tlbivax as well, etc.. I'm not working on real HW at the moment. I don't know what the exact characteristics of your target HW are... Ben.