Re: Probing for native availability of isel from userspace
From: Scott Wood <hidden>
Date: 2012-09-24 23:55:23
On 09/22/2012 08:46:06 PM, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
quoted
quoted
Have a look at /sys/kernel/debug/powerpc/emulated_instructions/ =20 then?=20 Userspace should *NEVER* rely on the content of debugfs, it will =20 change with time, it is not a guaranteed ABI, it's purely for people to look at... for debugging.=20 malc didn't say what he wants it for... People are in userspace as well ;-) =20quoted
At this stage I would recommend using arch 2.06 as your key/trigger =20 and either add a handful of known PVR values (mfpvr is emulated) for =20 other CPUs you know support it (there shouldn't be that many), or just do =20 the heuristic :-(
The ISA says that isel is "Category: Phased-In (sV2.06)" -- are there =20 any 2.06 chips that don't have it?
That's for 64-bit; another good option for 64-bit is to just never use isel, it hardly ever buys you anything. It is much more useful on the (older) 32-bit cores that support it.
Why is it more useful on 32-bit? If you're referring to the =20 performance of specific cores rather than some architectural thing, =20 maybe that's true with some chips, but on the Freescale side I'd be =20 surprised if e5500 were much different from e500v2 in that regard. -Scott=