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Re: [RFC] Hacky MTRR support
From: |
Colin D Bennett |
Subject: |
Re: [RFC] Hacky MTRR support |
Date: |
Mon, 28 Jun 2010 09:40:21 -0700 |
On Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:58:34 +0100
Colin Watson <address@hidden> wrote:
> I recently posted ("Subject: [PATCH] Optimise memset on i386" -
> sorry, I don't seem to have a route to lists.gnu.org at the moment so
> I can't post an archive link) about optimising GRUB's video
> initialisation, and hinted that it might be possible to do better by
> implementing MTRRs as well in order to allow the system to combine
> writes to video memory rather than taking a cache stall for every
> single write. I can report that, at least on the hardware I was
> using, it does make a significant difference: filling the screen with
> solid colour now takes 10 milliseconds rather than 160! This ended
> up shaving about a second off the boot time of the project I'm
> working on.
In addition to the improved startup speed, I see the potential for a
huge increase in graphical menu responsiveness if caching is enabled.
Would framebuffer draw and image blitting performance be improved by
using write-combining with MTRRs?
Regards,
Colin