radeon, apertures & memory mapping

[Jon Smirl]

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 23:04:59 +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt
<benh at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> 
> > AGP as it's currently used is pretty much pointless for software fallbacks
> > since reading from AGP memory is nearly as slow as reading from video
> > memory.
> 
> Hrm.. I wouldn't expect _that_ slow. It's uncacheable, right, but still
> on a faster bus. Especially if we use it the way we do on ppc where we
> actually map the RAM pages directly instead of having processes go
> through the GART.

I asked at the Xdev conference if there were page table tricks that
would work for accessing GART memory.  Everybody said no but I'm still
wondering if there are any.

For example the ppc has an instruction for flushing specific pages
from cache, unlike the x86 where you can only flush everything.

So on the ppc you could leave the GART memory mapped normally and
cached. Do all of your fallback calculations, then flush the address
range from cache. Now tell the GPU to go use it.

Can't GART memory be normally cached RAM as long as we flush the cache
before telling the GPU to use it?

If you are doing fallback calculations in a 6MB buffer that is 1,500
pages. Accessing all of this effectively flushes the data cache. Once
you are done with it you probably don't want those pages in the cache
anyway.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com