[Fwd: Re: [Qemu-devel] RFC: Code fetch optimisation]

[J. Mayer]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: Jocelyn Mayer <address@hidden>
> Reply-To: address@hidden, address@hidden
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] RFC: Code fetch optimisation
> Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:24:44 +0200
> 
> On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 18:21 +0300, Blue Swirl wrote:
> > On 10/12/07, J. Mayer <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > Here's a small patch that allow an optimisation for code fetch, at least
> > > for RISC CPU targets, as suggested by Fabrice Bellard.
> > > The main idea is that a translated block is never to span over a page
> > > boundary. As the tb_find_slow routine already gets the physical address
> > > of the page of code to be translated, the code translator could then
> > > fetch the code using raw host memory accesses instead of doing it
> > > through the softmmu routines.
> > > This patch could also be adapted to RISC CPU targets, with care for the
> > > last instruction of a page. For now, I did implement it for alpha, arm,
> > > mips, PowerPC and SH4.
> > > I don't actually know if the optimsation would bring a sensible speed
> > > gain or if it will be absolutelly marginal.
> > >
> > > Please comment.
> > 
> > This will not work correctly for execution of MMIO registers, but
> > maybe that won't work on real hardware either. Who cares.
> 
> I wonder if this is important or not... But maybe, when retrieving the
> physical address we could check if it is inside ROM/RAM or an I/O area
> and in the last case do not give the phys_addr information to the
> translator. In that case, it would go on using the ldxx_code. I guess if
> we want to do that, a set of helpers would be appreciated to avoid
> adding code like:
> if (phys_pc == 0)
>   opc = ldul_code(virt_pc)
> else
>   opc = ldul_raw(phys_pc)
> everywhere... I could also add another check so this set of macro would
> automatically use ldxx_code if we reach a page boundary, which would
> then make easy to use this optimisation for CISC/VLE architectures too.
> 
> I'm not sure of the proper solution to allow executing code from mmio
> devices. But adding specific accessors to handle the CISC/VLE case is to
> be done. 

[...]

I did update my patch following this way and it's now able to run x86
and PowerPC targets.
PowerPC is the easy case, x86 is maybe the worst... Well, I'm not really
sure of what I've done for Sparc, but other targets should be safe.

Please comment.

-- 
J. Mayer <address@hidden>
Never organized

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