Markos Chandras f1014d1b79 MIPS: mm: Use the Hardware Page Table Walker if the core supports it ... The Hardware Page Table Walker aims to speed up TLB refill exceptions by handling them in the hardware level instead of having a software TLB refill handler. However, a TLB refill exception can still be thrown in certain cases such as, synchronus exceptions, or address translation or memory errors during the HTW operation. As a result of which, HTW must not be considered a complete replacement for the TLB refill software handler, but rather a fast-path for it. For HTW to work, the PWBase register must contain the task's page global directory address so the HTW will kick in on TLB refill exceptions. Due to HTW being a separate engine embedded deep in the CPU pipeline, we need to restart the HTW everytime a PTE changes to avoid HTW fetching a old entry from the page tables. It's also necessary to restart the HTW on context switches to prevent it from fetching a page from the previous process. Finally, since HTW is using the entryhi register to write the translations to the TLB, it's necessary to stop the HTW whenever the entryhi changes (eg for tlb probe perations) and enable it back afterwards. == Performance == The following trivial test was used to measure the performance of the HTW. Using the same root filesystem, the following command was used to measure the number of tlb refill handler executions with and without (using 'nohtw' kernel parameter) HTW support. The kernel was modified to use a scratch register as a counter for the TLB refill exceptions. find /usr -type f -exec ls -lh {} \; HTW Enabled: TLB refill exceptions: 12306 HTW Disabled: TLB refill exceptions: 17805 Signed-off-by: Markos Chandras <markos.chandras@imgtec.com> Cc: linux-mips@linux-mips.org Cc: Markos Chandras <markos.chandras@imgtec.com> Patchwork: https://patchwork.linux-mips.org/patch/7336/ Signed-off-by: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>		2014-08-02 00:06:39 +02:00
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asm	MIPS: mm: Use the Hardware Page Table Walker if the core supports it	2014-08-02 00:06:39 +02:00
uapi/asm	MIPS: asm/reg.h: Move to uapi	2014-08-02 00:06:38 +02:00