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This patch adds the necessary code to patch a running kernel at runtime
to improve performance.
The current implementation offers a few optimizations variants:
- When running a SMP kernel on a single UP processor, unwanted assembler
statements like locking functions are overwritten with NOPs. When
multiple instructions shall be skipped, one branch instruction is used
instead of multiple nop instructions.
- In the UP case, some pdtlb and pitlb instructions are patched to
become pdtlb,l and pitlb,l which only flushes the CPU-local tlb
entries instead of broadcasting the flush to other CPUs in the system
and thus may improve performance.
- fic and fdc instructions are skipped if no I- or D-caches are
installed. This should speed up qemu emulation and cacheless systems.
- If no cache coherence is needed for IO operations, the relevant fdc
and sync instructions in the sba and ccio drivers are replaced by
nops.
- On systems which share I- and D-TLBs and thus don't have a seperate
instruction TLB, the pitlb instruction is replaced by a nop.
Live-patching is done early in the boot process, just after having run
the system inventory. No drivers are running and thus no external
interrupts should arrive. So the hope is that no TLB exceptions will
occur during the patching. If this turns out to be wrong we will
probably need to do the patching in real-mode.
Signed-off-by: Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
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Helge Deller