Re: L4Android performance issue

Hi,

Thanks. Please see the inlined response.

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Adam Lackorzynski
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed Jul 11, 2012 at 15:20:33 -0500, Mai, Haohui wrote:
>> This is an important problem to solve. I'm seeing 60x slow down on the
>> graphics component of L4Android right now because of this frame buffer
>> issue.
>
> This is software rendering versus something with hardware support.
>

Exactly. That's the reason why I really want to enable it. :-)

>> I'm using an Eee PC which has an i945 chip. I tweaked my configuration
>> a little bit but I still had no luck.
>>
>> There're two possible bugs(?) here:
>>
>> (1) The driver got confused because l4pci changes the func field of
>> the pci table. The func field in PCI table is to describe whether
>> there's another device attached to the slot. Here is code in Linux
>> kernel causing problem:
>>
>>         gmch_device = pci_get_device(PCI_VENDOR_ID_INTEL, device, NULL);
>>         if (gmch_device && PCI_FUNC(gmch_device->devfn) != 0) {
>>                 gmch_device = pci_get_device(PCI_VENDOR_ID_INTEL,
>>                                              device, gmch_device);
>>         }
>>
>> On my machine, L4PCI reports the func field of my card (gmch_device in
>> the code) as 1, which makes it find the "next" display card (i.e.,
>> executing the if branch).
>> Therefore it cannot find the device.
>>
>> I worked around it by disabling the if statement, and the kernel can
>> detect the card and map in mmio memory.
>
> Are you using PCI_bus_ident() instead of PCI_bus() in your vbus config?
>

I have PCI/CC_03 mapped in two caps, one in PCI_bus_ident() and one in
PCI_bus(). I could try it out.


>> (2) L4Linux is unable to execute "wbinvd" instruction. wbvind is a
>> privileged instruction to write back all caches and invalidate them.
>> The driver is executing this instruction at ring 3 -- thus generating
>> a #GP fault.
>>
>> This is more troublesome and I don't really have a good idea of how to
>> fix it. I appreciate if you can tell me the quickest way of fixing it.
>
> Looking at this a bit... this is just done for initializing the
> ringbuffer which lives in non-caches memory already. It does not seem to
> be used during runtime. There's also no comment why such a complete
> global flush is required at all. Maybe to flush something else? Hmm. My
> suggestion would thus just be to comment that out and see if it works
> without.
>
>

There're a couple places that uses this instruction. I did try to
disable the wbinvd instruction entirely but      it didn't work. So
what do you think to take to implement it in L4Linux?

>
> Adam
> --
> Adam                 [email protected]
>   Lackorzynski         http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~adam/
>
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