MXC nand controller performance

Hi,

Hi recently found out that on my i.MX27 board the mxc nand controller
performance nearly doubles when I disable interrupts. Can anybody
confirm this behaviour, possibly on other i.MXs?
I'm trying to figure out what to do. We could disable interrupts
completely in which case the driver would become simpler. Maybe using
polling mode has other impacts on other workloads, so maybe we want to
add a flag to platform_data instead of disabling interrupts completely.

You can use the following patch to disable interrupts. It is not meant
for inclusion in this form of course.

Sascha


From ae3909b90667a13f7bbd6a042b6b65ea7c74ee48 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:52:32 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] mxc_nand: disable interrupts

Signed-off-by: Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>
---
 drivers/mtd/nand/mxc_nand.c |    2 ++
 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Hi Sascha,

2009/8/20 Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>:
> Hi,
>
> Hi recently found out that on my i.MX27 board the mxc nand controller
> performance nearly doubles when I disable interrupts. Can anybody
> confirm this behaviour, possibly on other i.MXs?
> I'm trying to figure out what to do. We could disable interrupts
> completely in which case the driver would become simpler. Maybe using
> polling mode has other impacts on other workloads, so maybe we want to
> add a flag to platform_data instead of disabling interrupts completely.

A flag sounds like a good idea.

> You can use the following patch to disable interrupts. It is not meant
> for inclusion in this form of course.

I can give it a try on i.MX31, how do you measure the performance?

/Magnus

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 10:10:27PM +0200, Magnus Lilja wrote:
> Hi Sascha,
> 
> 2009/8/20 Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Hi recently found out that on my i.MX27 board the mxc nand controller
> > performance nearly doubles when I disable interrupts. Can anybody
> > confirm this behaviour, possibly on other i.MXs?
> > I'm trying to figure out what to do. We could disable interrupts
> > completely in which case the driver would become simpler. Maybe using
> > polling mode has other impacts on other workloads, so maybe we want to
> > add a flag to platform_data instead of disabling interrupts completely.
> 
> A flag sounds like a good idea.
> 
> > You can use the following patch to disable interrupts. It is not meant
> > for inclusion in this form of course.
> 
> I can give it a try on i.MX31, how do you measure the performance?

I did a 'time cat /dev/mtdblockx > /dev/null' and looked at the time
needed to mount an ubifs. I haven't done any write tests though.

Sascha

Hi

2009/8/21 Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 10:10:27PM +0200, Magnus Lilja wrote:
>> Hi Sascha,
>>
>> 2009/8/20 Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > Hi recently found out that on my i.MX27 board the mxc nand controller
>> > performance nearly doubles when I disable interrupts. Can anybody
>> > confirm this behaviour, possibly on other i.MXs?
>> > I'm trying to figure out what to do. We could disable interrupts
>> > completely in which case the driver would become simpler. Maybe using
>> > polling mode has other impacts on other workloads, so maybe we want to
>> > add a flag to platform_data instead of disabling interrupts completely.
>>
>> A flag sounds like a good idea.
>>
>> > You can use the following patch to disable interrupts. It is not meant
>> > for inclusion in this form of course.
>>
>> I can give it a try on i.MX31, how do you measure the performance?
>
> I did a 'time cat /dev/mtdblockx > /dev/null' and looked at the time
> needed to mount an ubifs. I haven't done any write tests though.

I did some tests on a i.MX31 Litekit board using a kernel from Linus'
tree a couple of days ago ('time cat /dev/mtdblockx > /dev/null'):
with interrupts: 18s
without interrupts: 13s

No write tests or mounting filesystems were done.

/Magnus