xserver: Branch 'master' - 12 commits
Benjamin Herrenschmidt
benh at kernel.crashing.org
Thu Sep 28 17:30:27 PDT 2006
> Note that:
> a) MEMCPY_WRAPPED expands to a simple call to memcpy in libfb, so only
> libwfb uses this loop.
> b) fb24_32.c, which contains the comment you referenced, doesn't use
> MEMCPY_WRAPPED, so it will continue to do aligned CARD32 accesses.
> c) In libwfb, each of those accesses calls through a function pointer,
> which sucks way more than aligned/unaligned accesses (I assume. I
> don't know much about ARM).
On some platforms, unaligned accesses will trap, and have to be emulated
by the kernel, thus are way more expensive than a function call. Not
sure about ARM, but some embedded ppc's I think will be unhappy here.
Function pointer calls suck too, and probably more on fast archs, but
still...
> It's theoretically possible that some hardware could have a really funny
> tile pattern where doing memcpys from linear to tiled or vice-versa can't
> be done in chunks of four bytes. In practice, I don't know if that will
> ever be the case. If you really feel strongly about it, would something
> like this be better?
Can't you rely on memcpy being smart enough to do the right thing ?
Glibc memcpy will probably know the platform, do unaligned if it works
fine and avoid it if not on a given platform, and might even be
optimized for a specific CPU.
Ben.
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